DEFENSE MECHANISM AGAINST MORTALITY SALIENCE IN TURKISH MUSLIM POPULATION

Abstract

People who live in Turkey have experienced terrorist attacks for more than thirty years. In the past, the goals of the terrorist organizations were to frighten innocent civilians, but modern attacks are much more malevolent, and they have turned into indiscriminate massacres. In recent years, terrorist organizations have attacked big cities and the general population feels that terrorism is no longer a regional problem and anyone could be in danger. People who live in Ankara tried to cope with the truth `anyone can be a victim of successive terrorist attacks in 2016’. People`s reactions were very different from each other. Some of them stopped using the subway and some realized the importance of their lives. Naturally, attacks affect social, economic, psychological, and religious life in Turkey. The objective of this study is to determine defense mechanisms against fear of death after terrorist attacks. Therefore, this study used a phenomenological approach as a method of qualitative research. This way, the researchers tried to understand Muslim Turkish population tendencies considering its authenticity. This study applied open-ended questions in a semi-structured interview form on a sample of N = 26 selected by purposive sampling that lived in Ankara during June 2016. The ages of the participants in the sample’s ranged from 18 to 50 and the mean age was 37.5. The group consisted of 15 female and 11 male participants. In this study, the researchers determined four different defense mechanisms that are in the Muslim Turkish population. These defense mechanisms were religious-active, religious-passive, non-religious-passive, and non-religious active (Figure 1). As a result, the researchers realized that neither classical Islamic philosophers’ destiny/qadar approaches nor modern psychologists’ fatalism approach could describe the Muslim Turkish population’s defense mechanism against mortality salience. Therefore, this authentic sample needed authentic measures and concepts.