“The Bereavement Experience of Chinese Persons in Hong Kong” Submitted by

Chinese people treat death as a taboo, and the topic is usually avoided in daily conversation. Moreover, the death of a family member is believed to be a family affair, and sharing with others seems inappropriate. These two factors make the bereavement experience of Chinese persons a special mysterious territory about which little is known. This research is an attempt to unveil this special terrain. Based on pragmatism, methodology pluralism is used in this research, which integrates both the qualitative and quantitative data collection method sequentially. Through four studies spread over three phases, it is hoped that a model will be formulated that describes the dynamics of the bereavement experience of Chinese persons in Hong Kong. In phase one, there are two exploratory qualitative studies. The first one was carried out in the community bereavement counselling centre in Hong Kong. Implementing a clinical data mining approach, the available videotapes of the counselling sessions of 52 bereaved ex-clients were reviewed and analyzed. Items related to bereavement reactions were exhaustively identified and systematically classified. As a result, a pool of 183 items describing the reactions of bereavement in Chinese was formulated. This item poo