The Effectiveness of a “Death Anxiety” Training Package Based on Abrahamic religions concentrating on Islamic Teaching on Mental Health and Death Avoidance of Cancer Patients in Isfahan, Iran

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 دانشجوی دکترای روانشناسی دانشکده علوم تربیتی و روانشناسی، دانشگاه اصفهان

2 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

3 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Science, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

4 Department of Internal Medicine, Faculty of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran

Abstract

This article is intended to design a “death anxiety” training package based on Abrahamic religions concentrating on Islamic teaching and also to investigate the effectiveness of this training on psychological health and death avoidance of cancer patients in Isfahan city, Iran. This research is designed based on pre-test and posttest analysis including a control group. Twenty-six subjects (including 18 females and 18 males) were selected from cancer patients referred by Omid Hospital and Saba Oncological Clinic in Isfahan. Participants were randomly assigned to two groups (treatment group = 13 and control group = 13). The training package included seven weekly ninety-minute group sessions and the control group participated in seven sessions with some writing assignments with no purposeful training. Attendees filled up two questionnaires namely WHOQOL-BREF (α= 0.91) and DAP-R (α=0.88) in three time intervals: pre-test, posttest, and follow-up session held two month after final training session. SPSS-21 was used for data analysis. Comparing to the control group, subjects in the treatment group significantly increased in psychological health and significantly decreased in death anxiety and death avoidance. The result shows that training death attitude based on religious perspectives to cancer patients might help psychological health improvement.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Islamic Education
Volume 16, Issue 37
October 2021
Pages 121-139

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