Religiosity, fear of death and suicide acceptability.

The present research was an attempt to test two hypotheses derived from a recently proposed social psychological model of suicide: The acceptability of suicide is a decreasing function of religiosity and fear of death. Questionnaire data were collected for 205 undergraduates at a midwestern university in 1978. The questionnaire included several measures of religiosity, a factor analysis multidimensional fear of death scale, and a suicide acceptability scale. Results, showing that all of the religiosity measures and certain types of fear of death were significantly related to the acceptability of suicide, supported to the hypotheses under examination.