A Conceptual Model of the Anxiety of Death Based on Religious Texts

This study aimed to present a conceptual model of the anxiety of death based on religious texts and validate it; thus, through two strategies of "lexical search" and "open text-reading" and obtaining seventeen related words, 343 religious statements were collected by the judgmental sampling based on the principle of saturation in Islamic sources, and they were analyzed using the method of qualitative content analysis of religious texts (Shojaei, 2020a). The findings of the study showed that there are 10 symptoms of the anxiety of death, including unhappiness and sadness, cry and shout, escaping death, hating death, constant restlessness, thinking too much about death, disturbed dreams about death, not accepting death, the feeling of shame, and the regret of losing the world. Moreover, fourteen causal conditions and five consequences were identified. The validity of the model was examined according to twelve experts' viewpoints using Content Validity Index (CVI) and Content Validity Ratio (CVR) in order to make sure of the consistency of the findings with the content of religious texts and its application in the field of psychology. Finally, the conceptual model of the anxiety of death was depicted in the form of a general scheme. These findings provide an appropriate content for formulating the construct of the anxiety of death and designing a treatment intervention and an educational package.