The effects of purpose in life, emotional well-being, fear of death and compassionate love on ontological well-being

This study is conducted to investigate the effect of university students' purpose in life, emotional well-being, fear of personal death and compassionate love levels' effects on ontological well-being. The study has been put into practice by conducting an online survey with 287 undergraduate and postgraduate students whose age range are 18-57 and studying in a private or a state university throughout Turkey. The Purpose in Life subscale of "Psychological Well-Being Scale" (Ryff, 1989a), "Ontological Well Being Scale" (Şimşek ve Kocayörük, 2013), "Emotional Well-Being Scale" (Şimşek, 2011), "Fear of Personal Death Scale" (Florian ve Kravetz, 1983) and "Compassionate Love for Humanity Scale" (Sprecher ve Fehr, 2005) were used to measure the relationship between purpose in life, ontological well-being, emotional well-being, fear of personal death and compassionate love level of students. Students' demographic information is collected within "Demographic Information Form" which was developed by the researcher. In this study, all the data has obtained from the questionnaires were analyzed using SPSS 20 statistical software. In order to analyze the demographic variables percent and frequency analyses were employed. The relation between dependent & independent variables and the demographic variables has been analyzed by using independent t-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). The correlation between dependent and independent variables have been analyzed by Pearson Correlation analysis. Hierarchical Multiple Regression were employed to investigate the effect of the independent variables compassionate love, emotional well-being, fear of personal death and purpose in life over dependent variable ontological well-being. The findings of this study revealed that university students' ontological well-being was affected by gender, compassionate love, emotional well-being and purpose in life. However, fear of personal death was not significant predictor of the ontological well-being.