| The purpose of this study was to examine some of the theoretical and methodological constraints that the cognitive-developmental approach has imposed on research about children's understanding of death. As in other domains, cognitive-developmental research has defined death as a physical phenomenon to be understood in scientific-empirical terms. It has focused on a limited age range and has assumed that, by adolescence, children have reached a mature understanding of death. Little attention has been paid to the roles of cultural or experiential factors. Studies have used a wide array of instruments without considering the effect that different tasks may have on children's responses.; In an attempt to overcome some of these limitations, this study has explored the effects of age, gender, experience with death in the family and ethnicity on different kinds of knowledge that children displayed in their responses to different tasks. Chiidren's statements in their stories to a death-related drawing and a death-related picture from the TAT, and in their responses to the impersonal and personal versions of the Smilansky Death Questionnaire were classified as scientific, religious, emotional, ritual related and fantasy.; Sixty children in a public school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were individually interviewed for approximately thirty minutes. Their responses were tape-recorded and later transcribed for analysis. A quantitative approach to the data, which included a series of Repeated Measures Analyses, Analyses of Contrasts, Post Hoc Analyses of the Means, Correlation Analyses and Frequency Tests, was complemented with a qualitative analysis of the context in which children learned about death.; Overall, the results demonstrated significant differences in children's responses due to the specific kind of instrument and their age. The less structured instruments (drawing and TAT) elicited a wider range of responses, while both versions of the questionnaire evoked significantly more responses, especially within the scientific category. In general, younger children produced significantly fewer scientific, emotional and religious statements than older chiidren. Ethnicity and experience with death were found to have a more limited, but significant effect on children's responses to some instruments.; Older children seemed to be better able to relate to death in a multidimensional way. They incorporated in their constructions of death different kinds of knowledge (scientific, emotional, religious) in a way that was consistent with the dominant conceptions of death in their cultural groups.; Methodological and theoretical implications of these results were analyzed as possible avenues for further research in this area. |
