A Model of Willingness to Become a Potential Organ Donor

This article presents two models of the decision to become a potential organ donor. In the first model the act of carrying or requesting an organ donor card is related to values and factual knowledge regarding organ donation, through intervening attitude and willingness constructs. A sample of 286 students is used to test this model via the LISREL computer program for modeling latent variables. All hypothesized relationships had the predicted sign and were significant. This model is extended by adding the variables attitude towards death, prior blood donation, and age of subject to the model. A second sample of 365 adults from the local community is used to test the second model via LISREL. With two exceptions in the adult sample, all hypothesized relationships had the predicted sign and were significant. Where the two models overlap the results are generally similar. Implications of the models for marketing the act of becoming a potential organ donor are discussed.