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ABSTRACT

CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS OF DEATH RELATED TO
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

By
Virginia Clare wulf

The present study was conCerned with the
development of the child's concept of death and its rela-
tionship to cognitive development. Past research had
shown that there are three major stages of death concep-
tualization in children (Cousinet, 1940; Nagy, 1948; and
Mitchell, 1969). The ages at which these stages appear
are similar to Jean Piaget's three stages of cognitive
development, the pre-operational, concrete operational,
and formal operational thought processes, and it was
hypothesized that the child's concept of death developed
concomitantly with his cognitive development (Nagy, 1948,
and Mitchell, 1969).

The present study sought to test three hypotheses:

1) that the child's level of cognitive develop-

ment and level of death conceptualization are significantly
related,

Virginia Clare WUlf

2) that the specific cognitive area of egocentrism
is more highly related to death conceptualization than the
area of classification or the general level of cognitive
functioning, and

3) that the largest rate of change in death con-
ceptualization occurs between the ages of 6 and 8 years,
when the child first begins to experiment with logic in
his cognitive thinking.

Sixty-nine children from 4 to 11 years of age
were tested for level of cognitive development and level
of death conceptualization. The tests consisted of five
egocentrism tasks, five classification tasks, one question
related to physical causality, and twenty—one questions
about death which included four questions related to expe-
rience with death. Correlations and partial correlations
were obtained between the variables of death knowledge
and death experience, cognitive development, egocentrism,
and classification, with age held constant.

The results upheld the first and third hypotheses,
that cognitive development and death conceptualization
are significantly related and that the greatest change in
death conceptualization occurs between 6 and 8 years of
age. However, in comparing successive year levels, sig-
nificant differences in cognitive skills and death
knowledge were found only between 4- and S-year-olds and

between 6- and 7-year-olds; thus the large change in

'death conceptualization between 6 and 8 years was due

Virginia Clare wulf

only to the significant difference between the 6- and
7-year-olds. Results did not support the hypothesis that
egocentrism is more highly related to death concept
formation than is classification or general cognitive
development. Children's experiences with death were found
to be significantly related to death conceptualization,
and thus there is a combined effect of cognitive develop-
‘ment and experience with death in the formation of the
child's death concept.

The author concluded that the study of death
conceptualization is yet in its infancy, and that there
are a diverse number of variables which must be considered

before death concept formation can be truly understood.

Approved bye LJLA (A17 °\ 'J’L9‘3‘*/L*“W
I ‘

Date: W’louq‘ H‘ ’q73

 

 

CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS OF DEATH RELATED TO
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

By

Virginia Clare WUlf

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of Psychology

1973

T0 The Memory Of My Father

7221

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express my appreciation to Dr. Lucy
Ferguson, my committee chairman, for her insight,
patience, and continued guidance in all areas of this
study, to Dr. Marvin Eisen for his theoretical sugges-
tions, and to Dr. Lawrence Messé for his help in the
statistical analysis of the data.

My thanks to Mrs. Ann Eddington, director of
Eastminster Day Care Center, and to Mrs. Lynn Cherry-
holmes, principal of Cornell Elementary School, for the
use of their schoolrooms and children, for their patience
and cooperation throughout the testing, and for their
courageous support in carrying out a study in this
"sensitive" area.

I thank the seven undergraduates who served as
testers and scorers, especially Jeanne Ranger, who also
helped to condense and categorize the answers to the death
questions for the content analysis.

I also wish to express my appreciation to the
children of this study for being cooperative and candid,
and to their parents for granting permission for them to

be involved in the study.

iii

My thanks to Dr. Leon Weaver, for his support
and direction throughout my undergraduate and graduate
training, and for his encouragement and interest in my
personal and career goals.

I am indebted to my mother, my aunt, and my
sister, for without their love and their acceptance of
my goals, this thesis could never have become a reality.

And finally, my sincere thanks to Rik, for his
continual support, interest, love, and understanding

from the inception through the completion of this thesis.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES

LIST OF FIGURES

CHAPTER
I.

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESES

Literature Review . .
Statement of the Problem
Hypotheses . . . .

‘Pilot Study :

II. METHOD

III.
IV.

APPENDIX
A.
B.

C.

Subjects
Materials
Procedure .
Data Analysis

RESULTS
DISCUSSION

Hypotheses

Parental Reactions to the Study :

Incomplete Protocols
Content Analysis
Conclusion

PILOT STUDY TASKS AND QUESTIONS
LETTER TO PARENTS
PIAGET TASKS AND SCORING CRITERIA .

Page

- vii

viii

54
58
62

APPENDIX Page
D. QUESTIONS ON DEATH . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
E. SCORING CRITERIA OF DEATH QUESTIONS . . . . . 70

F. EXAMPLES OF DIFFERENT LEVELS FOR THE
DEATH QUESTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

REFERENCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

vi

LIST OF TABLES

Table Page
1. Product-Moment Correlations . . . . . . . . . 28
2. Partial Correlations with Death

Knowledge (Age Held Constant) . . . . . . . 29
3. Percent of Physical Causality Correct . . . . 31
4. Mean Transformed Scores of Death

Knowledge and Cognitive Development . . . . 32
5. Negative Answers to Death Question

Number 9: "Do some people want to

die?" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
6. Realistic Answers to Death Question

Number 10: "How old do you think

you'll live to be?" . . . . . . . 46
7. Responses to Death Question Number 21:

"What is death?" . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
8. Realistic Answers to Death Question

Number 13:"What happens to a dead

person' 3 body?" . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. Mean Transformed Scores of Death
Knowledge and Cognitive Development . . . . 34

viii

CHAPTER I

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESES

The present study is concerned with discovering
whether cognitive development, as described by Piaget's
theory of cognitive stages, is related to the develop-
ment of a death concept. It is designed to find out
whether the growth of cognitive structures and the
growth of a death concept develop concomitantly. While
much research has been done on Piaget's concepts, little
is known about what specific cognitive processes are
involved in the develoPment of a precise and limited
concept such as death. In fact, little research has
been done at all concerning the development of death
conceptualization in childhood. This lack of research
on the subject of death may be related to the fact that
death, even in these modern times, continues to be a
taboo subject in our culture. In the United States,
especially, we are psychologically unprepared for death,
grief, and bereavement--the human condition. Death, one
of the two most universal of life's processes, is not

dealt with by homes, schools, or society. This is a

serious handicap, for in the United States, one family

in ten has suffered a broken home by the time a child is
18 years of age (Clausen, 1960). And it has further been
found that parental loss in a child's early years corre-
lates significantly with later emotional problems (Bowlby,
1961).

It is time we, as a society and as individuals,
begin to deal with death openly with our children. If we
can find a relationship between cognitive processes and
death conceptualization, perhaps we can devise a better

way of explaining death to children of different ages.

Literature Review

 

Several studies have sought to understand the
development of the death concept in children. Kimball
(1971) found that death is not a fact for the child under
3 years of age; that such a young child knows only the
physical separation from its mother. Von Hug-Hellmuth
(1965) found that for the child from 3 years of age to
8 or 9 years of age, death is conceived of as merely a
temporary separation and is therefore not tragic. The
child learns from fairy tales that death is like a Sleep
from which one can be awakened or like a distant journey
from which one can return. This conception of death is

often reinforced by parents who describe the death of a

relative in terms of sleep or a journey. From this, the
child may View death as a graduated concept, depending
upon how ”far away" the deceased went.

For the child under 6, egocentrism plays a large
part in his conception of death. For him, words contain
power and give him a feeling of omnipotence. He believes
that wishes and the magic of words can make someone die,
and thus ascribes to himself the power over life and death
(Grollman, 1967, and Von Hug-Hellmuth, 1965).

Moriarity (1967) found that religious beliefs and
rituals may play an important role in the school—age
child's concept of death. He may learn that death leads
to an afterlife or that it is a punishment for aggressive-
ness and sin. Yet the abstract concept of death is mean-
ingless for the young child, and Moriarity points out that
young children may get a more real and literal knowledge
of death from seeing dead animals than from religious or
philosophical discussions.

Schilder and Wechsler (1934), using play observa-
tions, stories, and direct questioning with children
between 5 and 15 years of age, concluded that most children
deal realistically with death in that although they don't
want to die, they rarely express a fear of death. How-
ever, these children also did not believe that their own

deaths were probable.

Cousinet (1940) differentiated between ages of
children and found three major developmental stages in
children's thinking about death: 1) the refusal to accept
death, 2) the substitution of severe but curable illness
for death, and 3) the disappearance of death as a trouble-
some concept.

A more comprehensive study of the child's concept
of death was done by Sylvia Anthony (1940) who used
parents' written accounts of their children's spontaneous
interest in death, a story-completion test, and the revised
Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (1937) to study the
death-concept of children between 3 and 13 years of age.
Anthony found five distinguishable stages of children's
thoughts on death, ranging from ignorance to a clear defi-
nition of death in logical or biologically essential terms.
These stages of understanding were related more to the
child's intellectual performance than to his mere age or
personal experience of death. Generally, the child of
5 or 6 years attached meaning to death but not in logical
or biological terms. By 8 or 9 years, causal or logical
explanations were used to some degree. These findings
seem to parallel those of Piaget on the development of
the concept of causality. Piaget (1955) states that before
the age of 7 or 8, the child is not interested in logical

justification and merely asserts without proving. The ages

7-8 years become the turning point in the child's thought,
as the need for justification and logic appears.

A later study by Nagy (1948) also revealed a possible
parallelism to Piaget's developmental studies. Nagy used
compositions, drawings, and discussions with children and
found three major stages of the conception of death. In
the first stage, ages 3-5 years, the child conceives of
death as temporary and reversible. Life and consciousness
are attributed to the dead, who are conceived of as merely
being asleep. In the second stage, ages 5-9 years, death
is personified and is associated with aggressive intent on
the part of others. Death is not viewed as inevitable in
this stage, as the children could conceive of others dying,
but not of their own death. The last stage appears after
9 years of age, when death is seen as being universal and
related to natural laws. Nagy attributed these stages to
the developmental processes studied by Piaget. The first
stage occurs when the child is at the egocentric period of
development; he imagines his world as he experiences it;
thus everything is imagined as living. During the second
stage, which coincides with the concrete operational period,
the child is ruled by artificialism, the belief that the
world is made by and for man. Thus death is seen as an
eventuality but is outside of man and not universal. The

last stage coincides with Piaget's formal operations period.

The child is governed by reality and causal thinking and
sees death as the cessation of corporal activities.
Mitchell (1969) also theoretically related Piaget's
stages to those of the development of the death-concept.
She interprets Piaget's findings in a way comparable to
the child's development of a concept of death. Before
age 6, the child views everything functional as living.
From 6 to 9 years, life is defined by movement and death
is thus the lack of movement. From 9 to 12 years, spon-
taneous and impelled movement are distinguished, and life
is clearly distinguished by 12 years of age. Mitchell
does state that these ages may be too old in relation to
American children, but that the sequence is irreversible.
If these stages do begin and end a year or two sooner,
then one can see a strong relationship between Piaget's
conceptual framework and that of Nagy's concerning death.
At this point, a more detailed discussion of
Piagetian theory seems necessary. Piaget describes a
system of intellectual development based in structural
and operational terminology. While he regards intellectual
development as a continuous process, he emphasizes stages
of development. These stages not only denote that at a
certain age most children function in a certain way, but
also describe the sequences or operations through which a

child passes as he moves from a less to a more mature form

of thinking. The development of these structures begins
at birth and follows a fixed, irreversible order of suc-
cession through the different levels of cognitive develop-
ment. The succession of these levels, however, may be
accelerated or retarded by particularities of the physical,
social, and cultural environment (Piaget, 1956). Thus the
progression through Piaget's cognitive stages involves the
transformation of organized structures of thought and
action which emerge out of the individual's process of
maturation and his interaction with the social environment
(Kohlberg, 1969). The restructuring or modification of
these structures implies that each successive stage of
cognitive development integrates the structures of pre-
ceding stages rather than substituting new ones. Each
stage also involves both an aspect of assimilation of the
recently acquired process and an aspect of preparation or
accommodation for the process of the following stage. The
transition from one stage to the next is thus a fluid
rather than an abrupt change, and the age at which each
transition occurs may differ from one child to another as
a function of maturation and environment.

From this framework, Piaget has theorized four
major stages of cognitive development. The first, the
sensorimotor period, from birth to 18 months of age,

entails the utilization of the infant's reflexes to develop

practical knowledge and is conceptualized as primarily
preverbal. This stage will not be dealt with in this
study, as it involves children under 2 years of age who,
according to Kimball (1971), have no concept of death.

The next stage, the preoperational period, lasts from
approximately 2 to 6 years of age and is marked by the
emergence of symbolic functioning. It is during this
period that the acquisition of language takes place and
symbolic play appears. This stage is also marked by ego-
centrism, the inability to see others' viewpoints and to
communicate to others the workings of one's thought
processes (Piaget, 1951). The use of logical thought
processes also is lacking in the preoperational stage.

The child of this level thinks largely in perceptual
rather than conceptual terms and he is thus tied to con-
crete thought processes as opposed to abstract reasoning.
It is this preoperational period which appears to coincide
with Nagy's (1948) first stage of death conceptualization
where death is seen as reversible and with Anthony's (1940)
first stage where death is not defined in logical terms.
Thus the preoperational aspects of egocentrism and lack of
logic appear to influence the child's concept of death at
this stage. Logical thought processes begin to develop
during the period of concrete operations, from about 6 to

10 years of age. During this period, the ability to deal

with classes, relations, and numbers is expanded and the
use of reasoning about concrete objects becomes developed.
The age of 6 to 7 years has often been called the "age of
reason" because it is during this period that the child's
conception of causality is expanded beyond egocentric
beliefs. This probably explains Anthony's (1940) finding
of the appearance of logical explanations in the death
conceptualization of 7- and 8-year-olds and Nagy's finding
that by age 7 or 8, death is seen realistically, as
permanent and irreversible. It does not appear to be
until the period of formal operations, however, which
begins to develop at approximately 10 years of age, that
the child learns how to deal logically and abstractedly
with ideas as well as concrete objects. Thus, while the
death of others is a concrete fact and can be dealt with
logically at age 7, it is not until the period of formal
operations when death of the self, a more incomprehensible
and abstract conceptualization, can be understood, accord-
ing to Nagy (1948).

Thus in the realm of cognitive development, the
school age child progresses from a stage of preoperational
thought to that of concrete thought and finally to a stage
of formal operational thought; and in the realm of death
conceptualization, the child progresses from a stage of

concreteness to one of abstraction. Thus Piaget's concepts

10

of egocentrism and logic, which develop sequentially from
the subjective to the objective and from the concrete to
the abstract, appear to have relevance for the study of
death conceptualization. Although Piaget's work deals
primarily with cognition as manifested by children's
thinking about problems relating to quantity, size, space,
and other impersonal objective properties of the environ-
ment and there is thus no body of systematic findings
about the relationship of death conceptualization to cog-
nitive development, much of the work that has been done
in other areas such as social development can be related
to the present study.

One such area of social development is moral judg-
ment, which Piaget (1932) hypothesized as developing con-
comitantly to cognitive develOpment and which he later
divided into specific developmental stages similar to those
of cognitive development (Piaget, 1951). Recently, Lee
(1971) conducted an experiment to test the hypothesis that
moral and cognitive development progress sequentially and
concomitantly. Using six Piagetian cognitive tasks and
nine morally conflicting story situations, Lee tested
children between 5 and 17 years of age who ranged from
the preoperational to the formal operational periods.

Her findings gave support to Piaget's hypothesis and also

to Kohlberg's (1969) premise that all social development,

11

including moral judgment, entails a progression through a
sequence of stages parallel to those of cognitive develop-
ment and that a child's understanding of morality, or any
other natural or social phenomenon (such as death) is
limited to the extent that he is able to perceive, inter-
pret, classify, and integrate the environmental stimuli

in meaningful ways. Studies in other social development
areas such as role-taking and communication skills also
indicate similar parallel age trends (Flavell, 1968).

Theories of cognitive and social development have
also indicated that environmental experience is an important
aspect of these two developmental areas (Kohlberg, 1969).
Lee (1971) suggested that richer environmental stimulation
would facilitate changes in both cognitive structures and
moral judgment, one area of social development. Thus the
development of social knowledge is hypothesized as being
affected by social experience as well as by cognitive
growth and maturation.

From this discussion, it becomes evident that if
death conceptualization is taken to be another area of
social development, it should also develop sequentially
and concomitantly with cognitive development and be affected
by environmental experiences. The present author believes
that knowledge of death, although based primarily on

natural or physical as opposed to social phenomena, contains

12

elements of social development in that it is dealt with
in social institutions such as religion as well as in
interpersonal and social relations, either indirectly
through discussions or directly through experiencing the
death of a friend or relative. Thus, like moral develop-
ment, death conceptualization should develop concomitantly
with cognitive develOpment, as indeed it theoretically
appears to do in past studies of death concept formation
in children (Moriarity, 1967; Cousinet, 1940; Anthony,
1940; Nagy, 1948; and Mitchell, 1969). While a recent
study by Koocher (1972), using four Piagetian tasks and
four death questions, confirmed this hypothesis, the
present research, which was begun before the completion
of Koocher's study, expanded the study of death concep-
tualization and cognitive development and formulated some

additional hypotheses to be tested.

Statement of the Problem

 

From the literature, it becomes apparent that there
is a definite parallelism between a child's concept of
death and his level of cognitive development. Studies on
the development of a death-concept in children have men-
tioned this parallelism repeatedly and have pointed out
the similarity of age between cognitive and death-concept

stages. Several studies of death-concept development have

13

also discussed the cognitive-death concept parallelism in
terms of the different Piagetian frameworks of ego-
centrism, artificialism, and realism (Anthony, 1940, and
Nagy, 1948).

In View of the literature presented, the present
study is an attempt to test empirically whether the growth
of cognitive structures and the growth of a death-concept
do, in fact, occur concomitantly. Another goal of the
present study is to formulate a less subjective method of
measuring a child's conception of death than the story
completions, drawings, and parental accounts used in earlier
studies. Hopefully, this objective set of questions could

become a standard questionnaire on the subject of death.

Hypotheses

 

The following hypotheses will be tested:

1. The child's level of cognitive development, as
measured by Piagetian tasks, and his level of
death-conceptualization are significantly related;

i.e., they develop concomitantly.

2. Those areas of cognitive development which require
similar processes of logic as those needed for
death-conceptualization will be more highly cor-

related with death-concept development than a more

14

general measure of cognitive development or a
measure of cognitive development not related to
death conceptualization. Thus, the concept of
egocentrism will be more highly related to death-
conceptualization than would the more general
category of egocentrism and classification combined

or the category of classification alone.

3. The largest rate of change in death—conceptualization
will occur between the ages of 6 and 8 years, when
the child first begins to experiment with logic

in his cognitive thinking.

Pilot Study

 

A pilot study was done to ascertain if there was
any validity to the hypothesis that a correlation existed
between the stages of death-conceptualization and Piaget's
stages of cognitive development. Also, since an original
set of questions about death was used, the pilot study
served as an indicator of those questions which would be
valuable in obtaining relevant information on children's
knowledge of death.

Twelve children were used from public schools and
homes in the Lansing, Michigan, area. There were three

age groups of children, with four subjects in each group,

15

two males and two females. The age groups consisted of
4- and 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds, and lO-year-olds. These
age groups were selected because they fell within the
three major stages of children's concepts of death that
Nagy had found, and it was desired partially to replicate
her work to ascertain if these age differences indeed
existed.

Two independent sets of questions were used, one
tapping the child's cognitive level of development and one
tapping his concept of death (Appendix A).

The results of the pilot study confirmed that
there is a relationship between cognitive development and
death conceptualization, with age and experience with
death also being related to death-knowledge, although
less so than cognitive development.

Several other interesting findings were also sug-
gested. From the data, it appeared that religious beliefs
were not important in the development of a death-concept as
Moriarity (1967) had found, as the majority of children
were unsure of the religious affiliation of their families
or were not aware of religious beliefs concerning an after-
life. It was also found that, contrary to Nagy's (1948)
findings, 5-9 year olds can conceive of their own deaths,
although this conceptualization was based on an immature

death-concept. There also appeared to be no sex

l6

differences concerning ages of development or definition
of death, and whether a child was afraid of death or not
was also found not to be a factor influencing a child's
death—concept.

The death and Piaget items were checked for internal
consistency, and modifications were made with consideration
of these results. (Modifications will be explained in the

”method" section.)

CHAPTER II

METHOD

Subjects

Sixty-nine subjects were obtained between the ages
of 4 and 11 inclusively, with at least six children at
each age. It was decided to use this grouping of subjects
rather than the three groups of the pilot study so that
the transitional ages, where more variability should be
found, could be observed.

The variables of sex and religious affiliation were
not controlled, as the pilot study indicated that these
variables did not significantly modify the results.

Subjects were obtained through an elementary school
and a day-care center in the Lansing area. After permis-
sion from the schools was obtained, letters were sent to
the parents of children of the desired ages describing the
general nature of the study and asking permission to use
their child. A permission form and a stamped, addressed
envelope were enclosed for their use. Parents' reactions
to the research were also solicited so that any relation-

ship between these reactions and the results could be

17

18

studied. (See Appendix B for a sample of the parent letter
and permission form.) 0f the 218 letters sent to parents,
80 were returned granting permission. (See Chapter IV for

a discussion of parental reactions.)

Materials

 

Each child was administered a series of eleven
Piagetian cognitive tasks to determine his level of cog-
nitive functioning and a series of death-related questions
to determine his knowledge about death.

The first set of questions was based on Piaget's
techniques and theories and was mainly task-oriented in
nature. These questions covered two major areas of cog-
nitive development, namely classification and egocentrism.
Although these areas are not a global representation of
cognitive development according to Piaget, they tap areas
which this author believes to be related to conceptualiza-
tion of death. The pilot study indicated that the classi-
fication tasks were empirically related to the development
of a concept of death, in that the ages of the three major
stages of classificatory development were identical to the
ages of death—conceptualization stages of Nagy's study and
of the pilot subjects. The egocentrism task, while not as
empirically related as the classification tasks, appears

to be related in content as seen from previous research on

19

death-conceptualization (Nagy, 1948). That is, the logical
process needed to overcome an egocentric view of the world
is the same as that needed to conceptualize death in a
realistic way.

The five classificatory tasks were obtained from
research done by Kofsky (1966), who studied the ages at
which various classificatory tasks were passed, and from
Flavel (1963). The tasks include conservation of hierarchy
and horizontal reclassification (both passed on the average
by 7 years of age) and hierarchical classification, and
two tasks of inclusion (passed by 10 years of age).

The five tasks tapping egocentrism were obtained
from research by Flavel (1968), Piaget (1951), and Elkind
(1962) and include the following: perceptual egocentrism
(passed at 6 years of age), left-right discrimination
(passed at 7 years of age), story-telling (passed at 9 years
of age), and morality and relational concepts (passed at
10 years of age). While not all of these items are related
to the concept of egocentrism in the same way, they all
deal with the task of suppressing one's own egocentric
viewpoint in order to relate objectively to the situation
at hand and arrive at the correct response.

Ideally, cognitive tasks tapping knowledge of physi-
cal causality would probably show the greatest correlation

with death-knowledge because physical causality appears to

20

be both empirically and conceptually related to the process
of death conceptualization (Anthony, 1940; Nagy, 1948; and
Mitchell, 1969). However, since no studies verifying
normative ages at which various physical causality tasks
are mastered had been done, a group of such tasks could
not be included in the present study. The one physical
causality task on animism of the pilot study was included,
however, as a partial check on this hypothesis.

Descriptions of all of these Piagetian tasks and
the criteria for passing them are in Appendix C.

The second set of questions was based principally
on the set of death questions from the pilot study (Appen-
dix A). Several changes were made, however, as some of
the items did not discriminate adequately between the age
groups and some of the questions tapped material which the
pilot study found to be irrelevant. Thus items 10, 16,
20, 21, and 22 were omitted from the final study because
they tapped unneeded information, and item 13 was dropped
because it did not discriminate between ages of children.
While item 18 of the pilot study (item 15 of the present
study) did not adequately distinguish between ages, it
was embellished to include similar sub-questions because
Nagy (1948) had found it to be discriminative between 4-
and 7-year-olds and the present author felt that the added

sub-questions might strengthen the results in the direction

21

of Nagy's findings. Two new items were added to the final
study, items 17 and 21 (in Appendix D). Item 17 deals
with the concept of chance in death, and item 21 deals
with the child's ability to formulate a definition after
having answered the preceding questions. The present
author predicted that both of these items would not be
correctly answered until the age of 10 years, when the
onset of the concept of chance and the ability of abstrac-
tion occur.

The set of questions concerning death consisted
of two parts. Most of the questions tapped the child's
knowledge of death and death-related concepts. Because
experience may play a part in a child's concept of death,
four questions (items 4, 18, 19, and 20) tapped the child's
experiences with death or information resources from which
the child may have learned about death.

The death questions for the present study are listed

in Appendix D.

Procedure

 

The examiners consisted of three pairs of under-
graduates. The testing was done in pairs so that one
person could write down the child's answers verbatim as
the other asked the questions. The undergraduates were

familiarized with the testing by the present author and

22

given Appendices C and D which contain the cognitive and
death questions. They first administered the tests to the
author, who played the role of a child, to ensure that

the method of testing was understood and that they were
sensitive in their questioning.

The questions were administered to each child
individually, in a private room with a large desk or table
and three chairs. The child was told that the examiners
wished to understand children and what they thought about
different things. No reference was made to the subject of~
death. The Piaget questions were asked first as they were
unemotional and task-oriented, and gave the child a chance
to adjust to the surroundings and the examiners before the
more anxiety-producing questions on death were asked. The
questions on death were presented as "some different kinds
of questions" and again no reference was made to death so
that the children would not bias their answers to the first
several questions.

Scoring of the cognitive tasks and death-related
questions was done after the entire session, so that no
expectations of the child's performance on the death
questions could be formed. The recording of the children's
responses by the examiners, however, may have been biased
to some degree because the examiners were aware in a general

way of the children's ages and the hypothesized stages of

23

cognitive development and death knowledge. The use of a
tape recorder in future research would eliminate this
possibility.

The Piaget tasks were scored on a simple pass-fail
system. No intermediate scores were given for partially-
correct answers. This scoring system was used instead of
the three-point system of the pilot study because the
various stages of cognitive development are attained at
different ages for the various Piagetian tasks used in this
study. Since these skills develop at different times and
rates, the pass-fail method (one point for passing, zero
for failing) was used. Predictions could then be made as
to how many of the tasks would be passed at a certain age.
For example, 7-year-olds should attain a total score of
approximately 4, and lO-year-olds should get a total score
of about 11.' Pass-fail criteria for the Piaget items are
listed in Appendix C.

Answers to the death-knowledge questions were
scored in the following manner: a score of zero was given
to answers which revealed no understanding or a misunder-
standing of death and to responses of "I don't know"; a
score of one was given to answers which contained some
understanding, i.e., a mixture of right and wrong informa-
tion or a correct response with incorrect or no reasoning

behind it; and a score of two was given to answers

24

revealing both good understanding and realistic reasoning.
Death-experience questions were also scored on a zero to
two scale: a score of zero for no remembered experiences;
a score of one if the child had seen the dead in pictures
or television, or had remembered being told about death but
had forgotten the specific details; and a score of two for
having seen the dead first-hand and/or for remembering
specific death-related discussions. The death-scoring
procedure was done on a zero to two scale rather than on

a simple pass-fail basis because it was found from the
pilot study that most of the questions were not answered
totally correctly until ten years of age; thus the answers
had to be scored parallel to the three stages of death-
conceptualization to show age differences. (See Appendices E
and F for a more complete description of the scoring.)

The scoring was done by the present author and two
undergraduates. The scoring procedure was explained to
the undergraduates and Appendices C, D, E, and a set of
sample answers to the death questions were given as guides
to scoring (Appendix F). Each undergraduate then scored
two practice protocols and these scores were compared with
the present author's scores for the same two protocols.
Discrepancies were discussed and misunderstandings of the
procedure were cleared up at this time. Each person then

independently scored the protocols for all the subjects,

25

without the knowledge of age or grade to bias their results.
Each protocol was thus scored three times, and the con-
sensus score was taken if there were any discrepancies.
Interscorer reliability was calculated by dividing the
number of scores in agreement by the total number of scores.
The interscorer agreement (discrepancies included) was

92% for the overall set of protocols, 90% for the death
questions, and 95% for the Piaget tasks.

Reliability of the death questionnaire was esti-
mated by calculating a product-moment correlation between _
the odd and even numbered questions. The correlation (.62)
was then corrected for attenuation with the Spearman-Brown
prophecy formula for split-half reliability; The corrected
correlation was .77, indicating that the death question-

naire was a reliable measure of death knowledge.

Data Analysis

 

Each child's scores on the two questionnaires
were averaged and compared. The statistical procedure
consisted of doing product-moment correlations between
Piaget scores, death knowledge scores, and age, and a
partial correlation between death and Piaget scores, with
age being the variable held constant, so that any rela-
tionship found was not merely a function of age and/or

maturation alone. In this way, it was possible to look

26

at the relation of death conceptualization to differences
in maturity of cognitive development above and beyond the
influence of chronological age on both. The author looked
at not only a child's total cognitive-score correlation
with his death—concept score, but also at the correlations
of each of the two major areas of cognitive development,
classification and egocentrism, with the death-concept
and at the correlation of death experience with the death-
concept. Thus, several sets of correlates were studied
for each of the first two hypotheses previously mentioned..
For the third hypothesis, an analysis of variance
was computed between ages for levels of responses in both
death-concept and cognitive development so that significant

changes could be studied.

CHAPTER III

RESULTS

Product-moment correlations were obtained for age
with death knowledge, and for age and death knowledge with
general cognitive development, egocentrism, classification
skills, and death experience (Table 1). All of these
first order correlations were significant at the .01 level.
Because age, cognitive development, and death knowledge
were so highly correlated with each other, it was neces-
sary to compute partial correlations between death knowledge
and the other variables with age held constant before
testing the first twO hypotheses.

Hypothesis 1. The child's level of cognitive development

and level of death-conceptualization are
significantly related.

 

The results upheld this first hypothesis. The
partial correlation between total cognitive development
and death knowledge with age held constant was .33, which
is significant at the .01 level (Table 2). Thus, cogni-

f

tive development and death-conceptualization appear to

develop concomitantly and are thus significantly related.

27

28

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29

However, one must not assume a causal relationship between
these two variables, as no research has yet been done on
causal relationships between death knowledge and cognitive

development irrespective of age.

Table 2

Partial Correlations with Death Knowledge*
(Age Held Constant)

 

fi 1-

 

 

. Level of
Correlations Significance
Death Experience .40 .001
Classification .36 ' .001
General Cognitive Skills .33 .01
Egocentrism .23 .05

 

 

 

* N = 69

Although the partial correlation between death
knowledge and cognitive development was found to be sig-
nificant, the relationship between death knowledge and
death experience with age held constant was higher still,
yielding a partial correlation of .40, which is signifi-
cant at the .001 level (Table 2). This suggests that
knowledge about death is a complex variable, related to a
variety of processes or events, including experience with
death as well as cognitive development, which comprise

different aspects of death knowledge.

3O

Hypothesis II: The specific area of egocentrism is more
highly related to death-conceptualization
than classification or a general level of
cognitive development. '

 

This hypothesis was not upheld by the data, as the
partial correlation between egocentrism and death knowledge
was only .23 as compared to .33 for the partial correla-
tion between general cognitive development and death knowl-
edge (Table 2). The partial correlation between classi-
fication and death knowledge, however, was actually slightly
higher than that between general cognitive development
and death knowledge, yielding a correlation of .36. This
suggests that a knowledge of death entails processes more
similar to classification than to egocentrism, although
both may be necessary for a conceptualization of death.

An investigation of the correlations of egocentrism, clas-
sification, and death experience respectively with death
knowledge with the separate age levels suggested that
experience with death affects death conceptualization
progressively to a greater extent as the child matures.
However, the groups within year levels are too small to
permit a presentation or interpretation of these results.

The variable of physical causality was not found
to be related to death knowledge, but this may be an unfair

conclusion, as there was only one question related to

31

physical causality and thus little room for variations

among age groups (Table 3).

Table 3

Percent of Physical Causality Correct

 

 

 

Age N %
4 6 66
5 6 50
6 9 77
7 12 75
8 10 70
9 12 100

10 8 100

ll 6 66

 

 

 

Hypothesis III: The largest rate of change in death-
conceptualization occurs between the
ages of 6 and 8 years, when the child
first begins to experiment with logic
in his cognitive thinking.

 

To test this hypothesis, the raw scores of death
knowledge and cognitive development were converted to
proportions of the total possible score so that differ-
ences in scores would reflect only different effects of
the measures and not the different scoring systems. The

transformed scores were subjected to an unweighted means

32

analysis of variance whose factors were age and measure
(repeated within a subject). The ANOVA revealed a sig-
nificant main effect for age (F = 22.0655, df = 7, 61;-

p .00001) as predicted. The test also revealed a signifi-
cant main effect for the two measures (F = 41.8431,

df = 1, 61; p .00001); the transformed scores for the
Piaget tasks were consistently higher than those for death

knowledge (Table 4).

Table 4

Mean Transformed Scores of Death Knowledge
and Cognitive Development

 

 

 

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4 6 .2936 .3636
5 6 .4009 .4697
6 9 .3757 .4040
7 12 .5238 .6288
8 10 .5905 .6909
9 12 .5893 .7273
10 8 .5833 .8182
11 6 .6389 .8182

 

 

 

 

While this might lead to the conclusion that children's
levels of cognitive development are somewhat more advanced

than their knowledge about death, this effect may be merely

33

a function of the different questionnaires and their
arbitrary zero-points and ceilings. In fact, none of the
children achieved the highest possible score of 42 for
death knowledge, the highest score being only 31. This
was not true for the cognitive tasks, where the highest
score of 11 was achieved by some of the subjects. Perhaps
if more difficult Piagetian tasks were added to raise the
ceiling of cognitive development scores, the main effect
for measure might lessen in significance or disappear.

No significant interaction between age and measure
was found, again upholding the prediction that death
knowledge and cognitive skills develop concomitantly.

Hypothesis III was upheld by the data in that the
differences in transformed score means of death knowledge
and cognitive development between 6 and 8 years of age
were .2198 and .2869 respectively, higher than those for
any other two year span (Table 4). Looking at the rate
of change of one year spans (Figure 1), however, it becomes
apparent that the largest rate of change for the two
measures occurs between 6 and 7 years of age. Individual
age comparison F-tests of the transformed mean scores for
consecutive ages revealed that the change rate of the
measures between 6 and 7 years of age was significant at
the .001 level (F = 16.5236, df = l, 61). The change rate

between 7 and 8 years of age was not significant. Thus,

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35

although the rate of change in death knowledge and
cognitive skills appears highest between 6 and 8 years of
age, this change rate is only large because of the sig-
nificant 6- to 7-year-olds' mean rate of change. The
only other significant change for the two measures
occurred between 4 and 5 years of age (F = 5.4107,

df = l, 61; p .05). This may be a function of different
populations or settings, as the 4-year-olds were obtained
from a day-care center and the 5-year-olds were obtained
from an elementary school. Changes between other ages
were small and insignificant. It appears, then, that the
rate of change in both measures reaches a peak between

6 and 7 years of age and then levels off as the children

approach puberty.

CHAPTER IV

DISCUSSION

Hypotheses

The findings of this investigation clearly
support the hypothesis that children's concepts of death
are related to cognitive development. Death conceptuali-
zation and cognitive skills were also found to develop '
sequentially and concomitantly. Thus the child's under-
standing of death, a social phenomenon, is limited to the
extent that he is able to perceive, interpret, classify,
and integrate the environmental stimuli in meaningful
ways. Children with low levels of cognitive functioning,
therefore, generally have less mature concepts of death
than children with higher levels of functioning whose
experimentation with logic gradually leads them to shed
concrete death concepts in favor of more abstract ones.
As tapped by the two measures, concomitant growth was
dramatically shown in the specific jump in scores between
the 6- and 7-year-olds. Both the changes in death con—
ceptualization and in cognitive development were equally

and most highly significant in this one year span. While

36

37

the cognitive rate of change was theoretically expected,
in that 6 to 7 years of age is known as Piaget's "age of
reason" when the onset of logic occurs, the fact that death
knowledge also advances significantly between 6 and 7 years
,of age clearly points to the parallelism in development of
cognitive skills and death knowledge.

The role of the environment was clearly found to
be of importance in the process of death conceptualization
in that the relationship between experience with death and
death knowledge was slightly stronger than that between
cognitive development and death knowledge. This supports'
not only Kohlberg's (1969) assertion that cognitive structure
development is the result of an interaction between matura-
tion of the individual and environmental experiences, but
also his assertion that social development, such as moral
judgment (or death conceptualization), is also affected by
experience as well as by cognitive development and matura-
tional levels. Thus, it appears that a knowledge of death
is affected as much by experience with death as by age,
maturation, and general cognitive functioning. That is, a
child with little death experience may have a comparable
concept of death to a child with more death experience if
the former child's cognitive level of functioning is higher;
similarly, a young child using preoperational constructs may

have a more mature concept of death than a child using

38

concrete operations if the preoperational child's
experience with death is greater. This was found to be
true in several instances in the present study. If a
child's concept of death seemed more mature or less
mature than children of his age with a similar score on
cognitive functioning, one had only to look at his death
experience score in 6 out of 9 cases to find an answer
to the apparent discrepancy between cognitive and death
knowledge scores; and if a child's experience with death
seemed more or less extensive than children with a similar
death concept, a look at the child's level of cognitive I
functioning solved the discrepancy between his death
experience and death knowledge scores in 8 out of 13 cases.
The specific process of egocentric thinking,
although significantly related to death conceptualization,
was not found to be as strongly related as classification
skills or general cognitive development. This might sug-
gest that the ability to see different points of view is
less important to the process of death conceptualization
than is the ability to think logically and abstractly.
This interpretation is reflected in the finding that the
greatest change in death conceptualization occurs during
Piaget's "age of reason," when logical thinking first
occurs (between 6 and 7 years of age). Thus, this study's

hypothesis that the greatest change in death conceptualization

39

occurs between 6 and 8 years of age was upheld, but this
change was largely a function of the significant change
between 6 and 7 years of age, while the change between

7 and 8 years of age was insignificant.

Although a more precise understanding of death
concept formation and its relation to cognitive develop-
ment would require longitudinal data (by allowing the
opportunity to study individual children's development
through the cognitive and death concept stages), the
present study does uphold the premise that the two pro-
cesses develop concomitantly. In studying a complex
variable such as death knowledge, however, one must be
careful to look at more than one related factor so that
oversimplifications, unwarranted causal assumptions, or
over-estimations of one particular association are not
made. In future studies of death conceptualization, it
would be interesting to include more than four death
experience items as well as different areas of cognitive
development in a questionnaire, so that other, yet unknown

relations might be found.

Parental Reactions to the Study

In addition to cognitive development and experience
with death, another area of study that may help to explain

the development of children's concepts of death is parental

4O

attitudes towards death, which were obtained in this study
from the permission forms.

Of the 218 permission letters sent to parents, 80
were returned granting permission, 59 were returned deny-
ing permission, and 79 did not reply. (The final sample
size only totaled 69, as some of the children did not
finish the testing and some were not needed because the
author wished to keep the age groups similar in size.)

Of the parents granting permission and giving their
reactions to the study, several attitudinal trends became
apparent. The major attitude expressed was the belief in.
the relevance of this and other studies on death. Out
of this belief stemmed an interest in knowing the general
results of the study. Eight of the parents mentioned
recent deaths or funerals that their child had experienced
and this fact often was followed by the desire to know
their child's responses to the death questions. In fact,
a total of 15 parents requested specific details of their
child's responses. Religious beliefs were mentioned by
six of the parents from both positive (”religion helps us
to face death") and negative ("religion deals unrealisti-
cally with death") viewpoints. Five parents stated that
death was talked about freely at home, usually in relation
to specific events such as the death of a person or

animal. While five of the parents expressed a trust in

41

their children to handle the questions candidly, four
parents expressed some ambivalence and fear of their
children's possible sensitivity to being questioned about
death.

Of the negative responses that were elaborated
upon, the majority of parents feared that the questioning
could cause psychological strain to their child. This was
usually expressed in a straightforward manner such as "my
child is too sensitive, anxious, and easily depressed"
and ”he is only in kindergarten--he's too young." The
recent death of a family member or friend was mentioned
only twice, and few of these parents said anything about
the relevance or worth of the study. In fact, three parents
implied that research about death was unnecessary and
unappreciated: "My reactions to this study? Negative!"
Five of the parents feared that my probing would interfere
with their teachings and their child's beliefs, and four
also did not want their child to miss time from school.

In general, it seems as if the parents who replied
negatively were more protective of their children, and
perhaps more anxious about the subject of death themselves,
as few mentioned personal experiences with death. In com-
parison, parents granting permission were often very self-
disclosing about their own attitudes and philosophies of

death as well as about personal experiences they had had.

42

But the fact that so many of these parents wanted to know
their own child's responses may perhaps be an indication
that, as for the parents denying permission, death is not
an easy topic for them to discuss with their children.
Thus it appears that children may learn about the concept
of death from their parents, but that they may also learn
the anxieties and fears associated with death.

Of the parents who were ambivalent about or against
the idea of their child participating in this study, it
is evident that their major concern was the fear that dis-
cussing death would be disturbing or harmful to their '
child. In this study, it became apparent that this fear

was, for the most part, unfounded.

Incomplete Protocols

 

0f the children that the researchers attempted to
test, six children had to be dropped from the research
results. One would be tempted to assume that these children
were dropped because their anxiety concerning death inter-
fered with the testing. This was the case, however, for
only two of the children. Two of the children, 4- and
5-year-old girls, refused to answer questions or partici-
pate in the study, but since they were not told what the
study was about, there could be no relationship to death

anxiety. Two of the children, a 5-year-old girl and 6-

year-old boy, started the testing but did not complete

43

the first section on cognitive skills. Again these
children did not know that questions about death would
follow, and again death anxiety could not be a cause for
their refusal to continue. Only two of the children,

4- and 10-year-old boys, began the questions on death and
were unable to complete them. While death anxiety might
not necessarily have been the reason for stopping since
the few responses obtained did not seem different from
other children's responses, a description of the testers'
observations and an examination of the parents"reactions
to the study clearly indicate that the children became '
upset because of the questions about death. During the
testing session, both children became physically uneasy,
began to move around in their seats, and tried to distract
the tester when the tester began asking the questions
about death. From the permission slips, it is also appar-
ent that both parents were aware of their child's concerns
and fears about death, another indication that the chil-
dren experienced death anxiety during the testing.

Of the children tested, only these two or approxi-
mately 3% of the children experienced a level of anxiety
sufficient to prevent them from continuing. This per ,-
cent is considerably less than one might guess, which I
might lead one to conclude, as one parent did, that

"children are more candid about death than adults." But

44

perhaps a larger amount of anxiety may have been found
among the children whose parents denied permission. One
might conclude, however, that if parents are open and
secure about their death concept, their children will be

also.

Content Analysis

Because so much information can be lost by looking
only at statistical findings, the present author studied
the children's answers to the death questions and found
some interesting trends not covered by the three hypotheé
ses.

The death questions seemed to tap four major sub-
ject areas: 1) general facts about life (items 1, 2, 9,
10, ll), 2) general facts about death (items 8, 12, 14,
15, l6, 17, 21), 3) knowledge of events occurring shortly
after death (items 3, 5, 6, 7, 13), and 4) experience with
death (items 4, 18, 19, 20).

In the first subject area, most of the children
thought they would die if they held their breath, except
for the 4-year-olds who all said they didn't know what
would happen. The majority of the ll-year-olds (66%) said
that their face would turn red. Only seven children,
ranging in age from 7 to 11 years, gave the highest level

response, that they would faint. Only three of the

45

69 children (a 4-, 10-, and ll-year-old) said they believed
in ghosts, although most of the children knew that ghosts
were figments of the imagination, dead spirits, or people
with white sheets. Almost half of the children (43%) felt
that no one would ever want to stop living, but the per

cent of children believing this decreased with age (Table 5).

Table 5

Negative Answers to Death Question Number 9:
"Do some people want to die?"

 

 

m
m

 

Age N %
4 6 100

5 6 83

6 9 89

7 12 33

8 10 20

9 12 25
10 8 25
11 6 0

 

 

 

The sharp decrease between the 6- and 7-year-olds suggests
that the inception of logic, which also occurs at this
time, may be influencing the child's thinking about this
question. Six children ranging in age from 7 to 11 years

thought that they could live forever and gave such

46

interesting answers as "Indians can, if you take

communion,’ and "in heaven you can." Although no 4- to
6-year-olds thought they could live forever, the 4-year-
olds' concept of life span was unrealistically small, with
a mean prediction of 12.8 years, and at least half of the
5— and 6-year-olds gave unrealistic life span predictions
(outside of 65 to 100 years of age). The per cent of
unrealistic answers to the question of life span (item 10)
decreased with age (Table 6). The fact that most of the
children could give the predicted age at which they might
die is contradictory to Schilder and Wechsler's (1934) and
Nagy's (1948) findings that children from 5 to 9 years of

age cannot conceive of their own death.

Table 6

Realistic Answers to Death Question Number 10:
"How old do you think you'll live to be?"*

 

 

 

Age N %
4 6 0

5 6 50

6 9 33

7 12 75

8 10 7O

9 12 75
10 8 86
11 6 100

 

 

 

* A realistic answer was considered to be
between 65 and 100 years of age.

47

In the second category, general facts about death,
the concept of death as a violent phenomenon was presented
at all ages, and the idea of dying by illness was only
mentioned by children 7 years of age and older. Thus,
most children thought it would hurt to die. Eight chil-
dren believed that one could not die at any time, but
after 8 years of age the idea of unpredicted death was
accepted as fact. This finding was contradictory to the
present author's prediction that children would not reach
this level of response until 10 years of age. Another
eight children believed that one could come back to life.
after dying, although none of these were 4- or 5-year-
olds. This, coupled with the fact that no 4- or 5-year-
olds believed in an eternal life, suggests that the finality
and inevitability of death is accepted more readily at
young ages than at older ages. This acceptance is probably
related to the fact that the young child's concept of
death is unrealistic. Half of the 4-year-olds, for
example, believed that the dead could hear (a finding
which upheld Nagy's results) and no child under 7 years
of age gave a correct answer to the question "what is
death?” item 21. The per cent of correct responses to
"what is death?" increased with age, although about half
of the older children (9, 10, and 11 years of age) con-

tinued to give synonymous answers such as "death is when

48

you die" or "when you're not alive" (Table 7). Contrary
to Nagy's (1948) findings, only three of the children (a
4-, 7-, and ll-year-old) personified death, for example:
"death is someone that comes down and kills you." This
suggests that children in America use different mechanisms
than personification as a means of mastery over death.

One such mechanism may in fact be the use of synonymous
answers instead of descriptive detail in answering "what
is death?" By discussing death in synonymous as opposed
to descriptive terms, the finality and inevitability of

death are avoided to some degree.

Table 7

Responses to Death Question Number 21:
"What is death?"

 

—_FF—‘_T—_T——F———__TT—_=T_==—T===
Age N Erreieous Synoeymous Cogiect

4 6 100

5 6 66 33

6 9 78 22

7 12 18 75 8

8 10 30 50 20

9 12 31 23 46
10 8 - 25 25 50
ll 6 33 33 33

 

 

 

 

 

49

The third subject area, which tapped knowledge of
events occurring shortly after death, also yielded some
interesting trends. Of the 4- and 5-year-olds, all but
one S-year-old did not know what a funeral was. The older
children were all able to define a funeral realistically,
usually mentioning the fact that people go to see the
dead person and that a priest or minister is present. In
response to how dead people look, a few of the children
(none younger than 7 years of age) described the dead in
terms of discoloration of the skin or lack of body heat;
most described the dead in terms of functions they could.
no longer perform, such as "can't hear or talk" and "not
breathing or moving." Although this upholds Mitchell's
(1969) findings that children often define death by lack
of movement, it is interesting that, although most of the
children related death with violence, only four children
mentioned the presence of blood or mutilation. The fact
that the body rots after death was not acknowledged by
the 4-year-olds, but this fact was recognized increasingly
with age (Table 8). Only four of the 69 children (a 7-
and ll-year-old and two 9-year-olds) stated that people
are not sad when someone dies, but except for the 7-year-
old, all gave logical explanations of why this might be
true, for example: "if an enemy died, you wouldn't be

sad."

50

Table 8

Realistic Answers to Death Question Number 13:
"What happens to a dead person's body?"*

 

 

 

Age N %
4 6 0
5 6 33
6 9 22
7 12 50
8 10 80
9 12 83

10 8 63

ll 6 100

 

 

 

* A realistic answer was considered one

that referred to the decomposition of
the body.

The death experience category, previously dealt
with statistically, also yielded some interesting facts
about how children learn about death. Most of the chil-
dren at all ages had seen dead bugs and animals within
the past year, and none of the children younger than 6
years of age had ever seen a dead person. Few of the
children younger than 7 years of age had talked about
death with their parents, although this was based on the
child's memory and cannot be taken completely as objective

fact. But even of the older children (9 through 11 years

51

of age), only about half of them said they had talked

to their parents about death. The parent's explanations,
however, were for the most part realistic and usually
referred to a specific death-related event. About half of
all the children learned about death in other ways, usually
from television, movies, and unrelated adults (such as
teachers and priests). It is interesting that ten of the
children between 4 and 9 years of age stated that they
mysteriously "just know" about death, that something
inside them "had told" them what death was. Children
from all of the age levels said they had known a person
(usually a relative) who had died, and this per cent
generally increased with age. For the younger children,
however, it was sometimes unclear as to whether they had
actually known someone personally or whether they had

merely heard their parents discussing someone's death.

Conclusion

The development of death conceptualization in
children is a complex and difficult process to analyze.
While death concept formation in children is clearly
related to cognitive processes, there are a multitude of
other variables such as parental attitudes, religious
upbringing, and experience with death that contribute

to the formation of a death concept in children as well

52

as in adults. The complexity of interaction among these
variables is yet unknown, but perhaps through future
experimentation, the process of death conceptualization
will become less a mystery to psychologists and parents
as well.

This author suggests several areas of future
research. The present study could be extended to include
children ranging from 4 to 20 years of age. This would
permit an analysis of the relationship between cognitive
development and death knowledge through adolescence; the
present author predicts that this relationship would
decline in significance and perhaps become insignificant
in the adolescent years. Another area of research that
might produce added knowledge about the formation of
death concepts in children would be a study directly
comparing parental death concepts with those of children.
Parents and their children could be given the same ques-
tionnaire on death and correlations could then be made
between death concepts of the parent and child. Such a
study could answer the following questions: Are parent
and child concepts of death related? From.which parent
does the child learn most about death? Are children's
memories about experiences with death accurate?

Surely there is a wealth of information to be

learned about death concepts in adults as well as in

53

children. The study of death conceptualization is yet in
its infancy, and there are a diverse number of variables

which must be studied before death concept formation can

be truly understood.

APPENDIX A

PILOT STUDY TASKS AND QUESTIONS

54

PIAGET TASKS
(PILOT STUDY)

Classification

 

Present red and blue squares and circles
Ask child to sort them by shape, then by color
Then ask the following questions:

Are all the blue ones circles? Why?

Are all the squares red? Why?

Are all the circles blue? Why?

Are all the red ones squares? Why?

Number

Present a pile of 20 bottlecaps

Take a set of 8 (bunched) and ask the child to take
the same amount

Make two rows of the same number in a one-to-one
correspondence, and ask the child if there is the
same number in each row and why

Change the spacing of one of the rows and repeat the
questions

Distance

Present two "roads," one straight and one with angles

Move "car" a certain distance on straight road and ask
child to move same distance on angle road

Repeat two times, then switch "roads"

Quantity

Present equal-sized clear glasses with:
Unequal amounts of water
Same amounts of water
and ask: "Is there more, less, or the same
amount in each and why?”
Then pour one of glasses into different shaped glass
and repeat question

10.

55

Chance

Present two identical sets of blocks with different
colors

Put one set in a bag and ask child to draw out two,
but make predictions as to what colors he will get

Repeat three times

Egocentrism

 

Present a variety of objects, let child walk around
them to see their position

Seat child, ask him what he can see

Then ask what a doll can see from two different loca-
tions

Area Conservation

 

Present two ”meadows" made up of 3 to 5 squares each

Rearrange the squares, asking the child if there 13‘
still the same amount of "grass" in each meadow
and why

Morality

Tell two situational stories with two characters in
each story
Ask child who should be punished more

Quantity

Present equal size balls of clay

Roll one into a sausage and ask child if they are still
equal and why '

Then roll back into a ball, ask same question

Animism

Present a box hanging from a twisted string
Ask child why the box is turning

U'l-l-‘UON

\ooouox

10.
ll.
12.
13.
14.
15.

l6.
17.

18.
19.

56

QUESTIONS ON DEATH
(PILOT STUDY)

If you hold your breath for a long time, what will
happen? Why?

Are there such things as ghosts? What are they?
Do you know what a funeral is? What is it?
Have you ever seen something dead? What?

Do dead people look the same as when they were alive?
If not, how do they look different? Why?

Why are dead people buried?

Are people sad when someone dies? Why?

Does it hurt to die? Why or why not?

Do some people want to die? Why?

How old do you want to live to be?

How old do you think you'll live to be? Why?
Can people live forever? Why or why not?

Can children die? Babies? Why or why not?
How can someone die?

What happens after someone dies? (To their body?)
Why?

Are you afraid of dying? Why or why not?

Can people come back to life after dying? Why or why
not?

Can dead people dream? Why or why not?
Is sleeping anything like dying? Why or why not?

20.
21.
22.
23.

24.
25.

57

Do you belong to a church? What religion?
What does your religion say about death?
Do you know what a soul is? What is it?

Have your parents ever told you about death? What
did they say?

If not, how did you learn about death?

Has any person or animal you've known ever died?

APPENDIX B

LETTER TO PARENTS

58

Dear Parents,

My name is Virginia WUlf and I am a graduate
student in clinical psychology at Michigan State Uni-
versity. Recently, I have become involved in research
concerning the development of a child's concept of
death. It is my hope that in gaining an understanding of
exactly how a child learns about death, we may be in a
better position to formulate a better way of conveying to
each child this inevitable fact of life.

I am writing to you at this time to ask permis-
sion to question your child. I realize that this is a
sensitive topic, and will therefore conduct each inter-
view carefully, employing questions of a general nature,
seeking only the child's present knowledge of death.
Questions such as "What happens when someone dies?" and
"What is a funeral?" will be used. If you do agree to
allow me to question your child, which would be done at
his school, please do not give him any additional informa-
tion or prompt him in any way. There is no "correct"
answer for him to give.

Enclosed is a permission request form. Please
answer, sign it, and return it to me as soon as possible;
a stamped envelope is enclosed for your convenience. As
a part of this research, I am also interested in parents'
reactions to a study of death. I would therefore appre-
ciate it if you would jot down some of your feelings about
this research. Please include your reasons for granting
or not granting permission for your child to be a subject
in this study. If I do not hear from you within 10 days,
I will contact you again, probably by phone.

If you have any questions regarding this research
in more detail, please feel free to write or call me. Your
anticipated cooperation is appreciated.

Sincerely yours,

Virginia C. Wulf

109 Olds Hall
Michigan State University

East Lansing, Michigan 48823
(517) 489-1108

59

In addition:

Because many parents want to know exactly how
much time will be spent with their child and how the time
will be used, I have added this page to describe my
research in more detail.

In studies of children's concepts of death, there
appears to be a relationship between a child's death con-
cept and his level of cognitive development as measured
by a series of concrete tasks developed by Jean Piaget,

a French psychologist. My research consists of asking.
children cognitive-oriented questions as well as death-
related questions.

I will spend about 45 minutes with each child
individually. For the first 30-35 minutes, I will ask the
child to answer questions related to objects or materials
in front of him. For example, I will present the child
with two identical sets of different colored blocks, one
of which will be put in a bag. The child will be asked
to draw out blocks from the bag, guessing first which
colors they will be. This task taps the child's concept

of "chance,' one of the cognitive areas of development.
Many children see the cognitive part of the
questioning as fun, and it gives both the child and

myself an opportunity to become acquainted. Only the

60

last 5-10 minutes will be spent asking the child about
death. These questions will be asked with care and
sensitivity, and in no way will the child be forced to
answer a question or continue with the questions if he
does not feel that he can do so.

I hope this gives you a better idea of what I
will be doing with your child if you consent to his par-

ticipation in my research.

61

I understand that Miss wulf's research consists of asking
children questions about death.

I give my permission for my child to be questioned
about death.

I do not give permission for my child to be ques-
tioned about death.

Name of Child:

 

Child's School:
Child's Birthdate:

 

Date:

 

 

Parent's Signature

Your Reactions to This Study:

APPENDIX C

PIAGET TASKS AND SCORING CRITERIA

62

PIAGET TASKS AND SCORING CRITERIA

I. Classificatory Tasks

 

1.

Conservation of hierarchy--pass at 7 years of age
(from Kofsky, 1966)

Materials: 2 blue squares
6 red squares

Procedure: Present all of the squares and ask:
"If I took away all the reds, are there
just blues left, just squares left,
or both blues and squares? Why? If
I took away all the reds, would there
be more blues or more squares left or
as many blues as squares? Why?

Criteria for success: Two correct answers

Horizontal reclassification--pass at 7 years of age
(from Kofsky, 1966)

Materials: 8 wooden blocks: 2 red, 2 yellow,
2 green, 2 blue (one of each color is
a triangle and one a square)

Procedure: Each child is asked: a) to sort all
the objects that are alike into
classes, b) to sort a different way,
and c) to explain each complete group-
ing.

Criteria for success: To pass, the child must sort
into groups in which a) all the blocks
are alike in some respect, and b) all
that possess the criterial attribute
are included in the group. Then the
child must change his criteria and pro-
duce a new arrangement which conforms
to the above requirements (i.e., one
color group and one shape group).

63

Inclusion I--pass at 10 years of age
(from Kofsky, 1966)

Materials: 9 blocks: 2 blue triangles, 4 blue
squares, 3 red triangles

Procedure: The child must compare a number of
objects in different classes by
answering the following questions:

a) Are there more blues or squares?
b) Are there more reds or triangles?
c) Are there more triangles or blues?

Criteria for success: Two or three correct answers

Inclusion II--pass at 10 years of age
(from Flavell, 1963)

Materials: 2 red squares, 2 blue squares, 5 blue
circles ‘

Procedure: The child is asked the following questions:
a) Are all the blue ones circles? Why?
b) Are all the squares red? Why?
c) Are all the circles blue? Why?
d) Are all the red ones squares? Why?

Criteria for success: All the questions must be
answered correctly

Hierarchical classification--pass at 10 years of age
(from Kofsky, 1966)

Materials: 7 triangles: 4 red and 3 blue

Procedure: The triangles are arranged in 2 parallel
rows with both reds and blues in each row.
The experimenter says: "All of these are
called MEF's (pointing to each of the
shapes in both rows) but only some are
TOV's. What are MEF's? Which are the
TOV's?"

Criteria for success: The child must point to MEF's
and TOV's and explain his actions. ‘To
gclassify correctly, the child must define
MEF's in terms of an attribute shared by
all of them (ex.: triangles). TOV's must
be defined by an attribute shared b part
but not all of the group (ex.: blue).

64

II. Egocentrism Tasks

 

l. Perceptual egocentrism--pass at 6 years of age
(from Flavell, 1968)

Materials:

Procedure:

Two sets of three colored pictures.
One set consists of pictures of
animals and one set shows various
winter scenes.

The experimenter says: "I have some
pictures to show you," and presents one
set of pictures right side up to the
child, who is urged to name them. E
then says that a game will be played
where the child will cover his eyes
while E picks his favorite picture.

The child then opens his eyes and is
shown the picture so that it is seen
right side up. Then the child is asked
to pick his favorite picture while E
covers his eyes. When the child shows
E the picture, the orientation in which
the child presents the picture is noted.
The "game" is then played with the
second set of pictures.

Criteria for success: The child must orient the

picture right side up from E's point of
view on both trials to pass.

2. Left-right discrimination--pass at 7 years of age
(from Piaget, 1951)

Materials:

Procedure:

Pencil, penny, bracelet

The child is asked the following:

a) Show me your right hand; your left
hand; your right leg; your left leg

b) Show me my right hand; my left hand;
my right leg; my left leg (E sits
opposite the child)

c) (A coin is placed on the table to the
left of a pencil from the child's
viewpoint.) Is the pencil to the
right or the left? And the penny?

d) (E puts a coin in his right hand
and a bracelet on his left arm.)

You see the penny--is it in my right
or left hand? And the bracelet?

65

Criteria for success: All answers must be

correct; that is, the child must be
able to see left and right from
another's viewpoint.

3. Story-telling--pass at 9 years of age
(from Flavell, 1968)

Materials:

Procedure:

Seven pasteboard cards with the fol-

lowing pictures on each card:

1) The boy is walking along the side-
walk, whistling and waving a stick.

2) The boy looks frightened and drops
his stick as he sees a rather ugly
looking dog running towards him.

3) The boy runs, looking anxiously
over his shoulder at the dog, who
is in hot pursuit.

4) The boy is shown running with arms
outstretched toward an apple tree
laden with fruit; the dog is not
shown in the picture and the boy's
face (showing fear in the two
previous pictures) is hidden by a
branch of the tree.

5) The boy scrambles up the tree, with
the dog nipping at his heels.

6) The boy is shown standing up in the
tree; the dog can be seen across
the street, trotting away (he looks
smaller in this picture, and with
no visible evidence of ferocity);
although the boy's head is partly
turned in the dog's direction, it

shows no particular emotional expres-

sion.

7) The boy is seated in the tree, munch-

ing an apple, with the dog nowhere
in evidence.

The child is given the series of seven
pictures (in the above order) and is
asked to tell the story which the
pictures illustrate. Three of the
seven pictures are then removed (cards
2, 3, and 5--those with pictures of a
threatening dog). The child is then
asked to pretend that a doll is a real
person and is asked to tell the story
which the doll would tell from looking
at the remaining four pictures alone.

66

Criteria for success: Because of the way the

series is constructed, the four-picture
sequence suggests a radically different
story from the original seven-picture
sequence. The child's problem is to
suppress his previous perspective and
look at the four pictures naively, as
if seeing them for the first time.

The child's second story must include
some non-fear motive for the boy to
climb the tree, i.e., the dog must not
be seen as a motive for climbing and
must be seen as irrelevant to the story.
This is in contrast to the first story,
where the dog is central to the story
and is the primary factor motivating
the boy to climb the tree.

4. Morality--pass at 10 years of age
(Flavell, 1963)

Materials:

Procedure:

Two situational stories (below)

The child is told the following stories.
After each story, he is asked: "Who
should be punished more? Why?"

1) John steals 5 loaves of bread to
feed his poor and hungry family,
and Steven steals one loaf of bread
just for himself.

2) Sally accidentally breaks 15 cups
while helping her mother clean the
shelf, and Cathy accidentally breaks
one cup while trying to steal cookies.

Criteria for success: The child must decide that

the intent of the act is more important
than the outcome and must thus choose
to punish the person whose motives

were immoral. The child who sees rules
not as stemming from external authority
but as stemming from mutual respect and
cooperation will answer correctly.

67

5. Relational understanding--pass at 10 years of age
(from Elkind, 1962)

Materials:

Procedure:

None

The child is asked the following ques-
tion: If Allan has three brothers,
Bob, Carl, and David, how many brothers
does Carl have? How many brothers are
there in the family?

Criteria for success: The child must answer both

questions correctly. At 5-7 years of
age, the child is unable to coordinate
his own point of view With that of his
siblings. That is, he will deny that
his brother also has a brother. At

7-9 years of age, the child is aware

of the relation between having and being
a brother, but cannot readily construct
one from the other. It is not until

10 years of age that the child can
answer the above questions accurately,
by being able to conceptualize symmet-
rically and abstractly.

III. Physical Causality

 

l. Animism--pass at 7 years of age
(from Flavell, 1963)

Materials:

Procedure:

A box on a twisted string

The experimenter presents the box
hanging from the string. He holds
just the string and as the box turns,
asks: "Why does it turn?"

Criteria for success: The child must give a

realistic answer, i.e., that the

string is twisted or that the E in

some way has turned the box. Animistic
answers such as "it just wanted to"
which gives life-like qualities to
objects, and answers such as "the wind
blew it" which denies reality (we are
indoors) are failures.

APPENDIX D

QUESTIONS ON DEATH

U14>UON

\DmVCh

10.
ll.
12.
l3.
14.

,15.

16.
l7.
l8.

19.

68

QUESTIONS ON DEATH

If you hold your breath for a long time, what will
happen? Why?

Are there such things as ghosts? What are they?
Do you know what a funeral is? What is it?
Have you ever seen something dead? What? When?

Do dead people look the same as when they were alive?
If not, how do they look different?

Why are dead people buried?

Are people sad when someone dies? Why or why not?
Does it hurt to die? Why or why not? I
Do some people want to die? Why or why not?

How old do you think you'll live to be? Why?

Can people live forever? Why or why not?

How can someone die?-

What happens to a dead person's body?

Can people come back to life after dying? Why or
why not?

Can dead people dream? Think? See? Hear? What do
they do? Why?

Is sleeping anything like dying? Why or why not?
Can a person die at any time? Why or why not?

Have your parents ever told you about death? ‘What
did they say?

If not, how did you learn about death?

20.

21.

69

Has any person or animal you've known ever died?
Who? How old were you then?

If someone asked you what death was, what would you
tell them?

APPENDIX E

SCORING CRITERIA OF DEATH QUESTIONS

70

SCORING CRITERIA OF DEATH QUESTIONS

Death Knowledge

Level 1:

Level 2:

No understanding or wrong understanding

Any statement which reveals the child's lack
of knowledge concerning death and related topics.
Answers for this level could range from "I don't
know" to a false belief the child may have con-
structed or learned from.someone.

Examples: "You can die from holding your
breath."
"People can live forever."
"I don't know;"

Mixed levels of understanding and/or incorrect
or lack of logical reasoning

Answers which may be correct but for which no
reason is given and correct answers with a lack
of logical reasoning.

Examples: "Yes, people are sad when some-
one dies because they can't
play baseball any more."

"People don't dream when they die
because they stay awake all
the time."

Answers which contain both correct and incorrect
elements:

Examples: "People can't live forever, but
they can live to be 300 years
old."

"Babies can die, but not when
they're real little."
"Yes, it hurts to die."

Level 3:

71

Correct understanding of death and logical
explanations for answers

Examples: "Dead people are buried because

they rot and smell."
"Sometimes it hurts to die and

sometimes it doesn't. It
depends upon whether you die
of a heart attack or in a car
accident, or in your sleep or
from old age."

Death Experience

Level 1:

Level 2:

Level 3:

No remembered experiences

The child does not remember any death-related
experiences.

Examples: "My parents never told me about
death."
"I've never seen anything dead."

Vaguely remembers being told about death and/or
has had vicarious or distant death-related
experience

Examples: "I've seen dead people on TV."
"My mom told me something about
death, but I can't remember
what."
"My girlfriend's gramme died."

Remembers details of informative death-related
discussions and/or has had first-hand experience
with death-related events

Examples: "1 went to my gramma's funeral."
"My dad told me that dead people
go to heaven."
"I saw my dog die. He was hit by
a car."

APPENDIX F

EXAMPLES OF DIFFERENT LEVELS FOR THE

DEATH QUESTIONS

72

EXAMPLES OF DIFFERENT LEVELS

FOR THE DEATH QUESTIONS

If you hold your breath for a long time, what will
happen? Why?

0: You'll die
1: Face gets redder and redder
2: You'll faint

Are there such things as ghosts? What are they?

0: Yes or don't know
1: Not really, but child believes they exist
2: NO

Do you know what a funeral is? What is it?

0: Don't know; any incorrect answer

1: A funeral is when someone gets buried; any other
reference to death

2: A funeral is where people go to see the dead
person and mourn for him--before being buried

Have you ever seen something dead? What? When?

0: Can't remember; no
1: Seen dead people on TV; seen animals dead
2: Seen a person dead

Do dead people look the same as when they were alive?
If not, how do they look different?

0: Don't know
1: Yes, eyes closed, lying down
or
No, aren't breathing, are cold
2: Yes and no, with examples of both answers

10.

11.

Why

73

are dead people buried?

Don't know
No place else to put them; it's the law ,
They will rot and smell

people sad when someone dies? Why or why not?

Don't know; no

Yes, because they can't play with them any more;
they liked them

Yes, some reference to the finality of death

Does it hurt to die? Why or why not?

Don't know

Yes, die in car accident or other violent death
or .

No, die in sleep

Yes and no, depending on how one dies

Do some people want to die? Why or why not?

Can

NHO

Don't know

Yes, one specific and insignificant reason (ex.:
they don't like school)

Yes, general reason of unhappiness (ex.: life is
too sad for them)

old do you think you'll live to be? Why?

Unreasonable age, outside the range of 65 to 100
Age between 65 and 100, but reason does not
pertain to "general life expectancy" (ex.: "You
get too old after that.")

Age between 65 and 100, statement such as "that's
how long most people live to be."

people live forever? Why or why not?

Yes; don't know

No, general reason such as "get too old after that"
No, reason relating to the deterioration of organs
or the body in general

l2.

l3.

14.

15.

16.

74

How can someone die?

Don't know

From violence or accident
or

From malfunction of body

From both of the above

What happens to a dead person's body?

Can
why

0:
1:

Can

Don't know

Reference to burial, heaven, or "it just lies
there"

Reference to deterioration of body

people come back to life after dying? Why or
not?

Yes; don't know
No, no reference to finality of death
or
Yes, religious reason such as reincarnation or
living with God
No, reference to finality of death

dead people dream? Think? See? _Hear? What do

they do? Why?

0:
1:

Yes
No, statement personifying dead person ("They
just sit there")
or
Yes, because of religious reason such as reincar-
nation
No, statement referring to non-existence of person
after death.

Is sleeping anything like dying? Why or why not?

Don't know

Yes; lying down, eyes closed, etc.
or

No; can't breathe, move

Yes and no, with above examples

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

75

Can a person die at any time? Why or why not?

0: No; don't know

1: Yes, but exceptions given _

2: Yes, reference to accident or bodily dysfunction
at any time

Have your parents ever told you about death? What
did they say?

0: No; don't know, don't remember
1: Yes, but can't remember
2: Yes, general or specific discussion remembered

If not, how did you learn about death?

0: No other way
1: Friends, books, TV; but no specific remembrance
2: Same as #1, but event is remembered

Has any person or animal you've known ever died?
Who? How old were you then?

0: No, can't remember
1: Yes, person outside of family or an animal
2: Yes, person inside the family

If someone asked you what death was, what would you
tell them?

0: Don't know, erroneous or synonymous definition

1: Reference to accidents, burial, heaven, etc.

2: Death defined in terms of cessation of life by
physical injury or the end of organ functioning

REFERENCES

/

REFERENCES

Anthony, Sylvia. The Child's Discovery of Death. London:
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Bowlby, J. "Child Mourning and Its Implications for
Psychiatry." American Journal of Psychiatry,
1961, 118, 481-498.

Clausen, J. A. "Family Structure, Socialization, and
Personality." Review of Child Development
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Cousinet, R. "The Idea of Death in Children." Psycho-
logical Abstracts, 1940, 14, 499.

Elkind, D. "Children's Conceptualizations of Brother and
Sister: Piaget Replication Study V." Journal of
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Flavell, J. H. The Developmental Psychology of Jean
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Flavell, J. H., et al. The Development of Role-Taking
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Grollman, E. A. (ed.) Explaining Death to Children.
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Inhelder, B., and J. Piaget. The Growth of Logical Think-
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Basic Books, 1958.

Kimball, C. P., M.D. "Death and Dying: A Chronological
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1971, 1.

Kliman, G. "The Child Faces His Own Death." Death and

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Kofsky, Ellin. "A Scalogram Study of Classificatory
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Kohlberg, L. "Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive-
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book of Socialization Theory and Research,
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Koocher, G. P. ”Childhood, Death, and Cognitive Develop-
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; Mitchell, M. E. The Child's Attitude Toward Death. New
YOrk: Schocken Books, 1969. -

'L Moriarity, D. M., M.D. The Loss of Loved Ones. Illinois:
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' Piaget, J. The Child's Conception of Causality. New
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Piaget, J. The Child's Conception of Physical Causality.
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Piaget, J. The Construction of Reality in the Child.
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Piaget, J. Judgment and Reasoning in the Child. London:
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Piaget, J. The Language and Thought of the Child. New
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Piaget, J. The Moral Judgment of the Child. London:
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Piaget, J., and B. Inhelder. The Psychology of the Child.
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78

Schilder, P., and D. Wechsler. ”The Attitude of Children
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VVon Hug-Hellmuth, H., M.D. "The Child's Concept of Death."
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