Young Adults’ Views on Personal Death

Authors

Victor N. Soto, Portland State UniversityFollow

Subjects

Death -- Attitudes -- United States, Personal Narratives, Youth and death, Death -- Psychology, Fear of death, Young Adult -- Psychology

Abstract

Within academic discussions of death and dying, there is a deficit of qualitative studies on how young adults view personal death. This article explores young adults’ (18-24) views on personal death using inductive coding of the transcriptions of three 1:1 interviews and one focus group. Soto’s findings show that young adults view their personal death in three ways: 1) they reflect on family death experiences as frames of reference for personal death, 2) they rely on a life well- lived to ease anxiety around personal death, and 3) they use humor as a coping mechanism in thinking about and discussing personal death. These findings suggest that death greatly impacts young adults’ lives and connections to people. Soto offers a starting point for future research on young adults’ conceptualization of death and dying.

DOI

10.15760/anthos.2025.14.1.12

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/43933

Recommended Citation

Soto, Victor N. (2025) "Young Adults’ Views on Personal Death," Anthós: Vol. 14: Iss. 1, Article 12.
https://doi.org/10.15760/anthos.2025.14.1.12