Background:
Cancer is a life threatening disease that the patients are persistently troubled by the fear of relapse and death (Rowland, 1990). If the fear of death cannot be managed well, maladaptive consequences will occur affecting the life quality of survivors (Lehto & Stein, 2009). So a weekly 6-sessions psychological group aiming to promote an openness and acceptance to life and death was conducted. In order to measure the effectiveness of the intervention, the Death Anxiety Scale (Templer, 1970) was adopted.
Method:
A pre and post-test design was adopted. The participants joining the psychological group tackling spiritual concerns were invited to fill in a set of questionnaires before and after the group. The time interval between pre and post-test was six weeks. Templer’s Death Anxiety Scale was translated into Chinese and modified to avoid response bias. Besides, basic demographic characteristics and disease history were collected. The data was transformed into SPSS and the variables were labeled and evaluated. 138 sets of pre and post-test data were collected and paired T test was employed
Results:
The findings showed that there was a significant decrease of death anxiety level of the participants after joining the group (mean -1.601, p≤=.001). In order to check if any difference between the patients with different years of survival, sub group analysis was conducted. It was found that the level of decrease was similar between the group having cancer within 2 years and the group over two years.
Conclusion:
The participants had a significant decrease of death anxiety level after joining the group. Next stage a randomized controlled trial will be conducted to facilitate a better understanding to the effectiveness of the intervention. Video clips and contents of the group will be shown during the presentation.