Effect of Teaching the Components of Spiritual Intelligence on Death Anxiety in the Elderly

Objectives This study aimed at studying the effect of teaching spiritual intelligence principles on death anxiety among senior citizens living in retirement homes of Sanandaj City. Methods & Materials This study was a practical and quasi-experimental research performed by pre- and post-testing the control and experimental groups. The statistical population comprised all elderly residents of retirement homes in Sanandaj City. Twenty subjects were selected by convenient sampling from among the individuals who were willing to participate in the study and who received a high score in the death anxiety scale. They were then equally divided into two groups (10 subjects per group). The fear of death scale devised by Collet- Lester (1969) was used for pre-testing the subjects. The members of the experimental group received Spiritual Intelligence-based intervention in eight 90-minute sessions. The control group received no such intervention during this period. After the intervention, all the subjects were post-tested. The collected data were analyzed by the one-way and multi-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the SPSS-22 software.  Results The mean and standard deviation of the age of the experimental group was 62.5±5.68 years and control group was 63.1±4.33 years. The results of covariance analysis showed a significant difference in post-test between the experimental group (120.9±4.81) and the control group (131.3±8.65) (P≤0.01). So, the results indicate that educating the subjects about spiritual intelligence components reduced their death anxiety (P≤0.01). The intervention also reduced the death of others and dying of others dimensions in the subjects (P≤0.01), but no significant impact was observed for the death of self and dying of self dimensions.  Conclusion According to the findings, teaching spiritual intelligence principles reduces death anxiety. Therefore, it is recommended that more attention should be paid to teaching spiritual aspects in retirement centers