Abstract: Bereavement is a painful and stressful experience. Given the beneficial effect of social support on stressful events or adversities, it is naturally to expect that social support will facilitate one's grief adaptation. However, there are mix findings about this issue in the literature. One of the reasons might be the lack of deep understanding on bereaved person's experience of social support, before we asserting its usefulness of help. People may have special needs in bereavement, and social support can only play a positive role when it fit's the person's needs. Even though a theoretical model on social support in bereavement has been proposed recently, there is lack of substantial data about the actual experience of bereaved persons to enrich our understanding on this topic. Moreover, social support is the most common source for a Chinese bereaved person to seek help on the grief. Therefore, it is very important to build more knowledge on this topic, and to hear the insider's voice on their own experience. For such purpose, the present study adopted qualitative method to understand the experience of social support among bereaved Chinese adults. A purposeful sampling method was adopted in this study to include participants. Their age, gender, types of loss, and reasons of the death were all taken into consideration in the process of recruiting to maximize characteristic variation. Finally, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28 bereaved adults. Some of them joined the one to one in-depth interview, and the rest joined focused groups. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was adopted to analyze the data. The interviews reveal three main themes. The first is about the content of social support. It includes support regarding the after death issues (such as arranging the funeral), emotional support (including both help the person to process or distract from the grief), life recovery (adjusting to a new world without the deceased), and material support (such as helping with economic difficulties). Second is the main source of social support, which includes family members, friends, colleagues and other bereaved persons with similar loss experience. Government institutions also provide some form of support to the person. Finally is the influence of social support. We found that it facilitates the person's recovery through cognitive and emotional changes in the adjustment process. Social support helps the bereaved to release negative emotions, increase positive emotions, bring positive believes, and accept the reality of death. These findings provide vivid material to the understanding of social support for bereaved Chinese people. It is compatible to the latest model of Social Support in bereavement(SSB)(Li et al., 2013), as it demonstrates that the content of the support contains both loss-oriented and restoration oriented domains. Meanwhile, some types of support is consistent with the theoretical model, such as emotional support and instrumental support in both domains. However, it deserves to be noticed there are delicate discrepancies. For example, the informational support proposed in the original theoretical model did not come out as an prominent and independent type of support from the present data. The results shed light on the influence of social support in bereavement adjustment. Firstly, social support offers an accepting environment for listening to the bereaved, and talking about the bereaved. This is beneficial for renewing mental representations of the deceased person. Secondly, social support facilitates the acceptance of the loss, thus smoothes the progress of continuing the on-going life without the deceased. Third, social support offers a chance for the person to take a break from the grief, stop ruminating the loss or immerse in the negative mood. Finally, it helps the bereaved to solve practical problems in life, thus reduce the secondary stressors accompanied with the loss.

Key words: Bereavement, Social Support, Qualitative Research

摘要： 通过对28位丧亲者进行深度访谈，使用解释现象学分析法对质性资料进行数据分析，探索中国丧亲个体的社会支持体验。结果显示，丧亲社会支持的内容包括后事处理、情感支持、生活恢复帮助，经济与物资支持等。支持来源除家人和朋友之外，还包括同事、共同经历者，以及一些机构等。社会支持通过调节情绪、改变认知等方式促进个体对丧亲的适应。本研究结果为最新丧亲社会支持模型提供了支持，同时也反映出中国丧亲人群的社会支持特色。

关键词: 丧亲, 社会支持, 质性研究