The corelation between life satisfaction, self actualization and fear of death

In this thesis the relationship between life satisfaction, self actualization and death anxiety was examined. A total of 141 volunteers from a non governmental organization in Istanbul, completed the surveys. 53 of the volunteers were male (37,6%) and 88 were female (62,4%). With the aim of categorical analysis, the volunteers were divided into 3 age groups as 18-25 young adults (n=47, 33,3%), 26-59 working adults (n=52, 36,9%) and 60+ elderly (n=42, 29,8%). The mean of age is 39,20. People who volunteered to participate in this study were asked to complete a socio-demographic background questionnaire, satisfaction with life scale, short index of self-actalization, fear of death scale and death anxiety scale. The data collected in this study were analized with IBM Spss 20,0. Non-experimental cross-sectional and correlational research models were employed at the study. In order to examine the correlations amongst the variables, Spearman correlation coefficient was used and the Mann-Whitney test was employed to make comparison between any two of the variables. Besides, multiple linear regression analysis was used to examine the two models created; one had the death anxiety scale scores as the dependent variable and the fear of death scale scores were used in the other. According to the data obtained in the study, significance coefficient of the association between the fear of death Scale and the death anxiety scale was found to be highly significant (p=00,1). It was found that the association between fear of death and self actualization is negatively significant and self actualization is a significant predictor of fear of death or death anxiety. On the other hand, it was determined that the correlation between life satisfaction and fear of death is not statistically significant. However, it was also seen that the association between life satisfaction and self actualization is highly significant (p=0,001). This means, people who are more self actualized tend to be happier and more content with their lives. Key Words: Death anxiety, fear of death, self actualization, life satisfaction.