For nearly 2,000 years, Western death care practices were essentially limited to a single method of disposition—burial. In the United States, burial was the sole legal method of disposition until the late 1800s and early 1900s, when laws were changed to permit disposition by cremation. A century had to pass, after cremation was first legalized in the United States, for the cremation rate to hit double digits. Embalming began to be popularized after the Civil War, but did not become a normal part of American death care practices until the mid-1900s. For many decades thereafter, conventional wisdom accepted that embalming was a near universal practice in the United States. The modern American funeral industry is essentially defined by, and constrained by, the occupational licensing system that was created to govern it. That system is based on an assumption that the deceased will be embalmed after death and then buried.
Change comes slowly to American death care practices. At least, it did come slowly. Today we are experiencing unprecedented rapid and fundamental cultural shifts. Some of those shifts are well-documented, such as the shift from burial to cremation. Other shifts are discussed in anecdotal terms, but not well-documented. Chief among those shifts is a growing interest in environmentally friendly methods of disposition and the idea that baby boomers are leading a revolution to personalize death care.
In order to better understand the changing American attitudes towards death care, and interest in emerging methods of disposition, we conducted the first academic survey of a representative sample of the U.S. adult population designed to assess their openness to and preferences for six methods of disposition: casket burial, cremation, green burial, water cremation (aka alkaline hydrolysis), natural organic reduction, and donation to science. We also asked respondents about their willingness to consider embalming.
Respondents were presented with the definition of each method of disposition in a randomized order: cremation, casket burial, green burial, water cremation, natural organic reduction, and donation to science. The definitions were designed to be accessible to survey participants without specialized knowledge about death care.
