This dissertation, "The Bereavement Experience of Chinese Persons in Hong Kong" by Yin-man, Amy, Chow, 周燕雯, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled "The Bereavement Experience of Chinese Persons in Hong Kong" Submitted by CHOW Yin Man Amy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in March 2006 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 pool was given to another researcher of the team to construct and validate a measuring tool of grief reactions for Chinese, in study two. Study three is another qualitative exploratory study, carried out in the medical social work department of a general hospital in Hong Kong. Through semi-structured in-depth interviews with recently bereaved persons, themes relevant to the bereavement processes were listed. Based on the data saturation rule in determining the sample size, 7 bereaved persons were interviewed, yielding a total of 202 codes. These codes were carefully grouped into four families: relationship with self, relationship with the deceased, relationship with others, and coping. Ten variables generated from these families are included in study four, which is a quantitative exploratory one. Data were collected through a cross-sectional survey. Respondents include 140 clinical bereaved samples, 152 general bereaved samples, and 144 non-bereaved comparison samples. In this thesis, discussion focuses on three protective factors-hope, optimism and social support-out of the 10 variables included. It is hypothesized that the three protective factors are negatively correlated with bereavement outcomes. At the same time, it is predicted that three protective factors have buffering effects that moderate and mediate the relationship between bereavement and outcomes. Moderately strong and statistically significant correlations among the three predictors and outcomes were found. However, only the motivation component of hope, optimism and social network size of friends was found to have moderating effects on bereavement outcomes. Both hope and optimism were found to have mediating effects on bereavement outcomes but not on any aspect of social support. Based on these findings, implications for theory building, practice, and policy are offered. As this research is the first systematic sequential one that used methodology plura