Abstract
This article focuses upon whether 422 randomly selected older adults believe that Dr. Jack Kevorkian should or should not be prosecuted. The study was conducted by Ball State University's Department of Sociology in the Lynd's classic community setting of “Middletown,” a.k.a. Muncie, Indiana. The findings indicate that a majority of the respondents do not support prosecuting Kevorkian and also feel that the terminally-ill have the right to end their own lives. Of eight variables included in the initial analysis, four were found to explain most of the variance in attitudes toward prosecuting Dr. Kevorkian. Those variable are: attitudes on taking one's life to end suffering, political liberalism-conservatism, education and frequency of church attendance (R = 0.5331; R2 = 0.2842). Those who favor the right to take one's life to end suffering, who see themselves as politically liberal, who are more educated and who attend church less frequently, tend to oppose prosecution. A multivariate path analysis examines interrelationships between the eight variables previously mentioned.
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