Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Soen, Dan

Titel

The Right for a "Dignified Death": Religiosity and Attitudes towards Euthanasia among Social Science Students in Israel

Ist Teil von

• Social Issues in Israel, 2005-01, Vol.1 (1), p.230-258

Erscheinungsjahr

2005

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Sociological Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The paper deals with the attitudes of Israeli social sciences students towards physician-assisted death, in view of the marked increase in approval rates of voluntary termination of life practices for the terminally ill. Basically, it set out to assess the relationship between the students' self-identified religiosity & their attitudes towards euthanasia. It analyzes the findings of an exploratory study carried out on a purposive sample of one hundred twenty seven social sciences students in an Israeli public college. The administered questionnaire was meant to trace three components of the students' attitudes to PAD: affective, cognitive & conative. It embraced two parts, one dealing with feelings & opinions, the other -- with ideological behavioural attitudes. All in all, the study revealed that religiosity plays a major role in shaping attitudes towards assisted end-of-life, both in as much as the affective, cognitive & conative components of the students' attitudes are concerned. However, the study also revealed that lukewarm support for euthanasia transcends religiosity. It turned out that even the secular students' support for PAD was very reserved. One conclusion of the paper is that the institutional character or climate of the studied college was a possible major contributor to that uncharacteristic conservative attitude. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document.