Attitudes of the General Population, Cancer Patients, their Family Caregivers, and Physicians toward Dying and Death: A Nationwide Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Little is known about people’s attitudes toward death. We aimed to examine attitudes toward death and to investigate their associations with health status in various participant groups. We administered nationwide questionnaires to a total of 4, 107 individuals including general Korean population, cancer patients, family caregivers, and physicians. Association of attitudes toward five aspects of dying and death—the ending of life, fearing death because it is painful, anticipating an afterlife, preparing to practice charity and being remembered—and physical, mental, social, and spiritual health status were also analyzed. Attitudes differed. Most (63.4%-76.2%) accepted that death is the ending of life, 45.6%-58.8% feared a painful death, 47.6%-55.0% anticipated an afterlife, 88.5%-93.0% expected to forgive, and 89.9%-94.1% expected to be remembered after death. The general population, cancer patients, and family caregivers had similar attitudes but had more positive attitudes than physicians on the ending of life, fearing a painful death, and anticipating an afterlife. Accepting death as the ending of life and fear of death pain were inversely associated with mental, social, spiritual, or general health status, but participants anticipating an afterlife, expecting to forgive, or expecting to be remembered showed better social, spiritual, or general health status. This nationwide study of various participant groups shows that attitudes toward dying and death were associated with mental, social, spiritual, or general health, but not physical health status. These data suggest that sensitive and skillful discussions of death and dying might contribute to peaceful end of life.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".