Investigating the Relationship between Lifestyle and Attitude towards Death: The Case of Kerman Middle-Aged Adults

It is obvious that the most personal and most probable inner reality of human beings is death which is being kept hidden from public view and considered as a marginalized issue due to changes occurred in societies. This has led to a change in individuals' attitudes towards death, which is apparently influenced by social and cultural factors. Therefore, this research aimed to measure individuals' attitudes towards death and to explore the relationship between lifestyle and attitudes towards death and its variants. In this survey study, 415 middle-aged adults aged 40-65 years were studied in Kerman. Descriptive statistics of the study showed that 14%, 68.7%, and 17.3% of the respondents had negative, neutral, and positive attitudes towards death, respectively. The relationship between lifestyle and attitudes towards death and its variants was confirmed; however, the relationship between demographic variables (gender, marital status, level of education, and income) and attitudes towards death was rejected and their relationship with attitude variants was confirmed. Twelve percent of dependent variable variance was explained by four variables (namely body management, leisure-time activities, consumption of cultural goods, and gender). Concerning the variants of attitudes towards death, some variances of the variables fear of death (5%), death avoidance (6.1%), escape acceptance (4.5%), approach acceptance (8.7%), and neutral acceptance (13%) were also explained by the independent variables consumption of cultural goods, leisure-time activities, body management, gender, marital status, level of education and income.