Survey 1- understanding people’s thoughts about death in general
We created a survey in order to understand more about what people think about death and their knowledge about palliative care. However, we did not think about the consequences well enough before we deployed our survey; we needed to spend more time refining our questions.
Soon after, we received a few backlashes due to the sensitivity of the topic and the vagueness of some of the questions. Therefore, we received feedbacks from Bruce and Molly.
We revised some questions and decided to divide up the survey into 2 parts. The first survey is to gain more understanding of how people perceive and think about death, and the second survey is to learn about people’s knowledge about palliative care.
Our first survey:
Results
After about a week after we sent out our survey, we sat down to look at and synthesize the surveys. In total we received 154 responses from a variety of people. Below are the demographics:
Nationality:
American: 105
Thai: 15
Other (1 response for each country): 15
Canadian:6
Italian:6
China: 2
Korea: 2
Australia:2
Sweden: 2
Synthesis:
From the the responses that we received, we were able to come up with the main points that our respondents wrote about.
`Majority of people constantly think about death
As people age, more frequent thoughts about death due to:
- health deterioration of self/others around
- Death of loved ones(family members, friends, neighbors)/others around
- More thoughts and planning(how not to put burden on their children, life support…etc) of their children
- Those who were born before 1980 were likely to give more well thought out detailed answers. It seems because they are older they have experienced more love ones that have passed away, this could possibly be the reason why they think more about it.
- Those who were born from 1990–1999 gave relatively brief answers with little explanation.
Every one of our respondents wanted to have a peaceful death from old age.
Some causes for the thought of death:
- Witnessing/Experiencing death of the loved ones/someone close
- Diagnosed with an illness(all sorts of illness/disease that are somewhat life threatening)(i.e. Flu, cancer…etc)
- Ongoing existential crises
- Mental disorder(i.e. depression)
- Randomly
- Generally think about death more often as age increases
People conceive “Good Death” as:
- Painless (Fast/During sleep) including physical and mental
- Natural Death(Aging)
- After finishing wish list and have a good set of accomplishments
- Surrounded by the loved ones
- Interesting Quotes:
How would you like to be cared for?
- Comforted emotionally and physically
- At home( or in a similar, comfortable setting), not in hospital or icu room
- Surrounded by the loved ones
- Respectfully by professionals who treat me like a person
When would your end of life care begin?
- Near End of Life (majority of people, or when diagnosed with terminal illness)
- Has No Idea
What do you think made the quality of death of your loved one good? If not, what could have been changed to make the experience better?
Divided generally into 3 areas:
- Died too quickly to even assess the quality (had too little time).
- Generally not good(patient’s needs and wants were not granted). Due to either lack of communication or already in the phase of not being able to communicate.
- Generally good(patient’s wishes were granted). Either through good communication or dealing with pain well.
Anything you would like to add?
- Alot of people appreciating the work that we are doing and wishing us luck on the project. Tackling a topic that is overlooked and not talked about.
