The Research On The Spiritual Support For The Rural Empty Nest Elderly Under The Social Support Theory

There exist some characteristics of the aging population in China,such as large population base,high proportion,aging fast,get old before it gets rich and etc.With the change of family structure,the "empty nest" trend in family is becoming the main challenge of the aging problem.More and more scholars begin to pay close attention to the "empty nest "elderly group.In recent years,the rapid development of urban and rural economy has improved the level of material support for"empty nest"elderly in rural families.The spiritual needs has exceeded the material needs and playing an important role in the elderly support.This research mainly adopted qualitative research methods,and in the process of data col lection,the researcher used document research and structure-interview.Before the structure-interview,The interviewees had been filtered by some rules.They could divided into two categories:one is little children family(not more than two children);another is multiple-child family(at less three children).All of them were sorted by age and divided into three stages.In this empirical research,a total of 10"empty nest"elderly who from H town,which is a poor town in eastern Sichuan,were accepted structure-interview.By the analysis on data of structure-interview,the research found that there are five great problems of spiritual supporting rural"empty nest"elderly:first,low degree of the attention of the spiritual support;second,the supply and demand of spiritual support are differentiating;third,the spiritual life of "empty nest"elderly are boring and vapid;forth,the spiritual support for rural"empty nest"elderly relies on families support than others;fifth,the legal and institutional protection of spiritual support for rural"empty nest"elderly is weak.On this basis,with the core of spiritual support for elderly and the analytical framework of social support theory,the author puts forward the construction of social support system,which is based on the micro spiritual support network,supplemented by the macro spiritual support network.In the micro spiritual support network,the"individuar"and "families"are the main aspects.Firstly,in the aspect of individual the author suggests that:(1)improving the "empty nest"elderly's self-comfort ability to prevent mental illness;(2)improving the social participation of"empty nest"elderly to satisfied the needs of self-achievement.Correspondingly,in the aspect of macro network,the author suggests:(1)improving the children's spiritual support practice and methods to enhance the rural "empty nest"elderly emotional support;(2)integrating the resources about families and establishing the mutual aid organization within a great traditional family to achieve mutual assistance in supporting for old people.Secondly,the macro support network mainly consist of "community"and"society".The core of community is to cultivate the culture of helping elderly in rural community:(1)to carry out mutual assistance activities in the neighborhood;(2)to set up community care voluntary organizations;(3)to explore the local social resources.At last,the construction of legal system and social respecting education for "empty nest"elderly are the responsibility for whole society.This study focuses on solving the problem of "empty nest"elderly's spiritual support in the rural areas.Through the perspective of social support theory,this article constructed a better rural "empty nest"elderly's spiritual support system.Due to the limited capacity of the author's knowledge,there may exist some shortcomings in the study,the author hope to improve and enrich the rural "empty nest" elderly's spiritual support research in the future.