I don't think so, since it's no longer under my control. I'll e-mail our teacher and let her know though. It's "her" thing now that it's been condensed into a single set of questions and she posted it up, so maybe she can go in and fix that.

Thanks!

Thanks a lot for helping out, much appreciated!

Some of the questions felt a bit awkward for a Likert Scale, or didn't allow me to respond accurately (I'm still in school and have no experience in my field; I have no credit card debt).

Wow, more people. You guys are awesome, thanks a ton.

I'd comment on the other questions, but really I have no idea what they are since the only one's I've seen are my own, so there's simply not a whole lot I can say for now. When I get this finished up sometime in mid-December-ish though, I'll be happy to bump this back up from wherever it has fallen in order to say what I was doing specifically, and to let you all know how it turned out for whatever that's worth.

Again, thanks a lot, I really appreciate you all helping me out.

Last edited by Valeli (11-11-2013 12:38:30 AM)

Done. Hope it helps.

I know it's a bunch of different surveys but I still found it funny how it jumps from death to how much you use your mobile phone.

I am disappointed that the cell phone usage & attitudes to mortality pages were a non-sequitur. I honestly thought that was the point of the survey.

Don't know if you still need it but i just took the survey.

I just completed the survey as well - hopefully you still needed the participants!

Big thanks again to everyone who took this.

Just in case anyone else wanders in on this post, the data has officially been taken and tallied now, so don't feel compelled to do this any longer. I've had a little look at stuff, and the bits for my project trended as I expected, but didn't end up being statistically significant. Basically, the issue I think comes down to the survey format (Specifically, those open-ended prompts about how you think of death were from mine. I think that the nature of the survey as an electronic click-click-next thing, combined with the default tiny size of those text boxes, led to a lot of the very very brief replies put in there, which mucked things up for me a bit).

The various death bits in the survey actually weren't disjointed/separate people's work. My thing had to do with Mortality Salience induction (making people think about their mortality through the essay prompts) and how it tied into Core Self Evaluation Scores, Self-Esteem, and levels of death anxiety. Mortality salience is a neat thing that I can talk about a bit more when I come back to this (it's been found to play roles in the formation and strengthening of group identities, the support for armed intervention across cultures, and has even been used by insurance companies in advertising), but for now I'll just say that I had a specific hypothesis that Core Self Evaluation Scores would be more strongly correlated with death anxiety resulting from MS induction than the Self-Esteem scores traditionally used in the literature would be, because I felt that CSEs do a better job of encompassing a person's "real" identity and self-value than the traditional self-esteem measures (The CSE scale I used was the one created by Timothy Judge, and the Self-Esteem Scale I used was the 1965 Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale.) CSEs, by the way, are a relatively new measure designed around work-place efficiency with one goal being to find people who'll be "good fits" for a company, because they'll be more likely to stick with their job, enjoy their job, or... various other things. I can talk more about them when I come back to this too. But basically, they're just give a much broader view of what /I/ consider to be important factors in how one percieves their own self-worth than many actual self-esteem scales.

So yeah. Various past studies have showed that you need to give people ~5-10 minutes after subjecting them to Mortality Salience before checking on subsequent reaction (it needs to go from a conscious thought process to a subconscious one). My two brief open-ended essay prompts were borrowed from Pyszczynski's 2006 study on Mortality Salience and its effects on nationalism and support for armed intervention across cultures (that's the first that comes to mind... I think those two prompts are actually used in multiple other studies I looked at, but I can't recall them off the top of my head). So in addition to helping out with other people's surveys when you answered the filler questions between the self-esteem measures/essay prompts and the final death anxiety scale (which was 1/4 of the revised Lester-Collett Fear of Death scale. I just took the 7 questions pertaining to death of self, and ignored those focusing on emotions pertaining to death of others), the idea was to give people enough time to have that fade out of consciousness.

Ultimately, people overwhelmingly took "brief" very literally. Which, again, I'm sure wasn't helped by the default tiny size of the text box. I think the goal is to get closer to a page or so out of participants, which this just didn't lend itself to well. I want to get the average word count of the replies to each question, but it was quite low. Some people skipped it entirely (there was still no statistically significant findings after accounting for them, and excluding them from the set). As a side note though, I'm hesitant to /entirely/ explain away the unanticipated results this way because multiple previous studies have shown that things as brief as walking past a funeral home can adequately induce mortality salience in participants. So there might be additional issues I need to uncover. Age on the survey skewed young, and different age groups do have different responses. I haven't found any studies showing age-based differences on this particular aspect though (death anxiety measures after ms induction).

Anyways, I really appreciate everyone's help. I'd never have gotten this put together without all of you, and three or so other people in my class I'm sure would thank you as well, if they knew how many replies came from here. In the end, I ended up with an N of 126 (I think, I have to double check, but  around that), which was suitably large for present purposes.

Hopefully this is a suitable "basic" explanation of what I was doing. I'm leaving town for a week this weekend for Thanksgiving, but when I get back I'll finish looking at the data/putting my paper for class together, and after that I will be happy to give everyone here a more in depth run down on stuff. If I figure out who was in my group, I can let you know how their projects went as well. And I think I can get (most) of the final data results copied here as well, for anyone who wanted to see that. I can get the data for my project at least. I think for the everyone elses as well, but I don't want to promise that just yet.

Yeah, that's pretty much an on-point description.

Your question is actually a question I had too, and I was planning on having a control for this initially because doing it without one felt inherently wrong. It probably was inherently wrong. Due to the vagaries of my community college class I ended up not doing that though. Beyond that, if I had done it, I would have had to do it in another group's survey, which would have involved various different intervening questions, which could have thrown things off and made for a less than ideal comparison anyways.

A bad answer is that we already know about the nature of such effects due to previous studies like Routledge and Juhl's 2010 one "When Death Thoughts Lead to Death Fears: Mortality Salience Increases Anxiety for Individuals Who Lack Meaning In Life" (Cognition and Emotion, 2010. 24(5). 848-854), as well as Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, & McGregor's "Terror Management Theory and Self-Esteem: Evidence that Increased Self-Esteem Reduces Mortality Salience Effects" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1997. 72(1). 24-36), among others.

Even there though, you're right that I'd have wanted a control group to check up on the CSE score stuff at the very least, since the previous studies are focused on Self-Esteem and it's effects on MS induction. So what I did isn't in imminent danger of getting published anywhere, but for community college purposes CSEs depends enough on self-esteem that this is what ended up happening, given that previous studies have already established how self-esteem works with MS and impacts resulting anxiety (The big deal about CSEs is that they are supposed to be a measure of an underlying mechanic/attribute in individuals that allegedly explains how they form various related traits such as self-esteem, neuroticism, locus of control, and generalized self-efficacy. Those traits are, in fact, very strongly related to CSE scores. I don't have any citation for that off-hand, but various people have looked at the extent to which they all correlate with CSE scores and it's quite high. Especially self-esteem.

So... if you buy the research/findings of Judge and the other people who developed CSE's, CSEs are actually the principle attribute in individuals through which they determine/develop the particular levels of self-esteem that they end up with. So if self-esteem's relationship with MS induction has been established, it broadly follows that a relationship with CSE also exists to some significant extent.

Again though, you're right that if this was more serious I'd have wanted to take charge of things myself and get the control group set up. That's probably a somewhat disappointing answer.

Last edited by Valeli (11-22-2013 07:57:59 AM)

Oh, I think I see what you mean.

I need to get back to this when I have a bit more time. At a brief glance I think you're right in that the results do conflate death anxiety and induced death anxiety (unless, as you said, Self Esteem has no bearing on the baseline. Which I don't know about, but would find somewhat hard to believe at a guess).

But at the same time, all of the death anxiety here is also linked to the MS induction... there's no way to available here to try and parse out how much anxiety was added by that. But it's still a universal factor that everyone is exposed to. I'm not entirely clear on why we'd need to have separate levels if we're only interested with comparing correlations after ms induction, and aren't trying to figure out the extent to which that induction further "aggravated" preexisting anxiety.

I think I see what you're getting at though... You're suggesting that the /specific/ portion of death anxiety specifically brought about by the MS induction is the only portion that should be checked for a correlation against self-esteem and cse scores? Sort of like getting everyone to complete the death anxiety scale both pre-induction(A) and post-induction(B), and using each individual's changed value (B-A = Anxiety Caused by Induction) as the number to evaluate rather than simply using the number of a post-induction anxiety scale (B = Total Anxiety after Induction)?  That would certainly be a neat way to go about it. I still feel like I'm not entirely on the wrong track using Total Anxiety post-induction as the value to correlate to though, because with that we're still correlating to "Anxiety after Induction," which remains categorically different from a generalized anxiety prior to induction. And even if the MS specific contribution isn't split out, like I said, it remains a universal contribution across the board.

I probably need to get back to this later when I have a bit more time to think about it though. Must head out now. But that's a good thought. I'm probably going to think about it more and talk about it in my paper as a possible issue.