Talking to young children about death: an investigation of parent-child conversations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parent-child conversations have remained on the periphery of studies investigating children's developmental understanding of death and the circumstances under which death is first discussed with children have not yet been documented in the literature.The current program of research sought to investigate the content of parent-child conversations about death and the impact of such discussions.This dissertation is comprised of three manuscripts that collectively contribute to the literature by documenting young children's early experiences with death, exploring the role of parental beliefs and attitudes in parental explanations of death, and evaluating children's feelings and understanding of death after such conversations.The first manuscript reports on parental use of religious and biological explanations of death.Parents (n = 130) of children 1-to 7-years of age completed an online questionnaire.The types of explanations of death provided by parents were examined in relation to parental religiosity, afterlife beliefs, death anxiety, and perceptions of children's physical and emotional reactions to the conversations.The most frequent types of explanations provided to children were religious-spiritual.Parental beliefs in afterlife and death anxiety were able to accurately predict whether parents provided a religious-spiritual explanation.The majority of parents perceived no physical and emotional reactions in their children, however, there was a positive correlation between the biological explanation of the irreversibility of death and perceptions of children's generalized anxiety.The second manuscript provides information on children's earliest conversations about death and parental satisfaction with such conversations.Parents (n = 140) of children 2-to 7-years responded to an online survey regarding their children's vi rduire la peur au sujet de la mort et danger chez les enfants.Ensemble, les rsultats de ces trois tudes offre des donnes empiriques pour amliorer la littrature dveloppementale au sujet de la comprhension de la mort chez les enfants, ainsi que contribue une nouvelle ligne de recherche a ce domaine qui inclut les conceptualisations religieux-spirituel chez les enfants et le conversations entres parents et enfants.
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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".