Web-based Resources: Death-related Questionnaires

I have just discovered a whole new genre of web-based resources on death and dying - death-related questionnaires.

Leave Life is a web-based questionnaire that helps people explore their feelings about death and dying - whether their thoughts are about their own inevitable death or the death of a loved one. The questionnaire combines thought-provoking multiple choice questions as well as fill-in-the-blank text answers. The author is very sensitive to people's different levels of comfort with the topic of death and dying and continually reminds people that they can stop the questionnaire at any point. This excellent resource, however, contains some textboxes with font that is difficult to read. The site map page is helpful as there are links on each page that skip you ahead several sections. As a result, referring back to the site map is essential. The questionnaire is not analyzed and you are not graded in any way on your responses.

With the Reflections on Death questionnaire, visitors have the option of publishing their responses for public review. The author of the Reflections questionnaire states: "The idea of the questionnaire is to help you see Death as Teacher instead of merely as something to dread or suffer through." I think this applies to both questionnaires.

The Leave Life questionnaire allows you to either print out the survey so that you can hand write your responses, save the survey to your computer so you may type and save your responses or fill the questionnaire out on their webpage. The Reflections questionnaire is only available on-line and you must allow at least an hour to complete it, as it must be done in one sitting.

Leave Life also has a listing of other questionnaires including a depression scale, quality of life scale, Schedule of Attitudes toward Hastened Death, a tool for Scoring a Terminal Ill Patient's Desire for Death, among others.

Check these excellent resources out!