Concentrating The Meaning Of Existence:Dying People’s Death Anxiety And Social Work’s Intervention

With the rapid development of urban economy, serious aging problem and unhealthy lifestyle, the prevalence rate of cancers is found increasing. And the dying people’s need of hospice service is becoming huge and urgent. At present, as the Chinese hospice service is very new to the whole society, we need to find some theories and skills to fit the local needs.The purposes of this research are:1.To represent the occurrence process of studied9dying people’s death anxiety. And to describe the reduce progress of dying people’s death anxiety in studied3case work.2. To discover protective factors of death anxiety and the effective intervention.3. To expand existentialism social work theory.4. To contribute to the development of local hospice service.And qualitative methods are used in this study. The author will mainly focus on3long-term case works done by three social workers in the hospice project of "S" social service agency, which have been ended already. Each of these cases lasted with at least20times for more than8months. As complement materials, the author takes5long-term cases served by volunteers, which lasted for more than2months.This thesis is mainly focused on both occurrence process and interventional process (increase progress and reduce process) of death anxiety. I used personal interviews (to get each case’s information from social worker, client, supervisor and volunteer), participant observation (for more than one year) and secondary material (including case records and volunteers’daily log) as a combined material collecting method. And I used grounded theory method, opening coding and axial coding, single-case analysis, cross-case analysis and comparative method (with literature) as a mixed analyzing method.Findings:The occurrence process of death anxiety can be described as "dying people’s living condition↓→self evaluation of existence↓→death anxiety↑→defense of death anxiety↑". And the effective intervention progress can be described as "intervention:dying people’s living condition↑→self evaluation of existence↑→death anxiety↓→bad defense of death anxiety↓". Those paralyzed people with clear consciousness and in stable condition may suffer death anxiety more than others.Based on existentialism therapy, this study redefined "death anxiety" with more progressive description. Comparing with existentialism theory, I found skills focused on the senses can help cognitive disabled people to get the meaning of existence. An interventional model is concluded to serve local hospice service.