Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy
Open Access

Abstract

Research on the Evolution of the Death Psychology of Chinese People in the Context of Lifting COVID-19 Pandemic Restrictions: A Mixed Study of Weibo Big Data

Xiaowen Li* and Yuanqing He

Amid the novel coronavirus threat, individuals are compelled to ponder over profound existential matters like life and death. This study employs a mixed research methodology, merging grounded theory with big data mining techniques, to explore into the psychological adaptation mechanism when individuals confront death threats amidst epidemic deregulation. We fetched texts related to death psychology keywords from the Sina Weibo platform. Post data cleaning, the database incorporated 3868 Weibo texts. Grounded theory forms the basis for data coding and theory formulation. Subsequently, big data mining techniques, including topic mining and semantic network analysis, are employed to validate the formulated codes and theories. The findings demonstrate that within the "Emotion-Cognition-Behavior-Value" framework, the implications of death threats manifest in four aspects: Death anxiety, death cognition, coping efficacy, and sense of meaning. As time progresses, the study of death psychology can be segmented into four distinct phases: The tranquil phase prior to lifting pandemic restrictions, the threat phase at lifting pandemic restrictions onset, the coping phase mid-lifting pandemic restrictions, and the reformative phase post-lifting pandemic restrictions. The calculated outcomes of topic mining and semantic network analysis corroborate the coding results and theories derived from the grounded theory. This reaffirms that data mining technology can be a potent tool for validating grounded theory.

Published Date: 2023-11-17; Received Date: 2023-10-17