Spirituality and Religiosity: Relative Relationships to Death Anxiety

Abstract

To assess the relative contributions of spirituality and religiosity to levels of death anxiety, the Templer Death Anxiety Scale (TDAS) [1] and the Spiritual Well-Being Scale (SWBS) [2] were administered to 134 female and seventy-four male undergraduate college students. Results of a stepwise multiple regression analyses revealed that spirituality has a significant negative relationship with death anxiety, i.e., as the degree of certainty with respect to life after death, greater levels of satisfaction with life, and greater feelings of purpose in life increase, levels of death anxiety decrease. No significant relationship was revealed between religiosity and death anxiety. Taken together, these findings suggest that the inconsistency in research findings concerning the relationship between religiosity and death anxiety may be accounted for by the variable of spirituality. An additional finding was that female participants reported higher levels of death anxiety than males.