Elyse Singer
Southern Methodist University, TX·Social Science
As populations age and chronic illness becomes more common, many people now die slowly, over months or years, with physical and emotional suffering along the way. What dying people actually want at the end of life—and what their doctors, nurses and families want for them—is still poorly documented.
- Fields
Social Science
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
palliative care
end-of-life care
dignified death
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Document how terminally ill patients, their families and palliative care clinicians define a dignified death, using ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in health facilities.
- Examine the challenges palliative care providers face in trying to guarantee patients a dignified death, through case studies that follow individual dying patients and their care teams.
- Track ongoing social movement activity and legislation around expanded end-of-life options, and how families and medical providers respond to these laws and practices.
- Develop and test theories of the cultural and social factors that shape experience and meaning at the end of life, extending scholarship on care, bioethics and social gerontology.
More about the research
This project asks how terminally ill patients, palliative care clinicians and others define a "dignified death," at a time when laws expanding end-of-life options are drawing public attention.
Why it matters
End-of-life care is shaped as much by values and law as by medicine, yet clinicians often have little evidence about what patients and families mean by a good or dignified death. By documenting those definitions and the barriers palliative care teams face, this research could inform how hospitals, hospice programs and policymakers design end-of-life services and respond to laws expanding options for terminally ill patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Krista Harrison
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify how Black, Latinx and Asian American care partners define high-quality end-of-life dementia care, through interviews with 90 people about hospice and other home-based supportive care.
Jacqueline Kruser
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Map how time-limited trials of mechanical ventilation are actually carried out in five ICUs, using focused ethnography of 50 trials in patients with acute respiratory failure.
Fahad Saeed
University of Rochester, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine whether the CKD-EDU palliative care intervention, a decision aid plus palliative clinician coaching, reduces decisional conflict at one month in patients aged 75 or older with advanced CKD.
The school
Southern Methodist University: 7 labs on PI Pages, $63M a year on research, 136 research doctorates a year.
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