Study Of Psychological Crises Of "5.12 Earthquake Victims" In WangCangXian, Sichuan Province, China

At 14:28:04 on 12th May 2008, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake shook Wenchuan and Beichuan in Sichuan Province. The epicenter was located in at 30.986°N,103.364°E. The focal depth was 14 kilometers and the epicentral intensity was 11 degree.69142 people were killed in the disaster and 17551 people were missing. I mainly investigated one of the severely afflicted areas—Guangyuan area. Guangyuan City was 240 kilometers from the epicenter and the earthquake affected the entire Guangyuan area severely. Facing this unexpected natural disaster, the victims were confronted with serious psychological crisis. Most of them were faced with adverse reactions in emotional, cognitive, physical and psychological behaviors. The psychological crisis after the disaster affected the normal function of the victims" life and production and brought negative impact to the whole society.The research was made primarily through questionnaire and field interviews. I entered the Wangcang district of Guangyuan City in October 2008. After the field interviews, I designed the questionnaire accordingly. I went to the disaster area in December 2008 and May 2009 and completed the questionnaire. There are five parts in the questionnaire including general information, family status, damage degree, post-disaster psychology and post-quake relief and rescue and each part includes several subentries. This research mainly investigated the victims' phenomena of psychological crisis and analyzed the reasons of the happening of these phenomena through the field interviews. The data were collected through the questionnaire, processed by the spss16.0 statistical software. By combining the processed data with the field interviews, the following outcomes were got:among a good many of the possible reasons that will cause the post-quake psychological crisis, the victims' occupations and genders are significantly correlated with the appearing of the psychological crisis. Their characters are also closely related to the psychological crisis, the severity of the crisis and the duration of the crisis. Some other strongly related reasons are the ways of getting the information about the quake; the degree of fear towards the quake of the people around them; different family statuses; the change of the housing areas, family relationship and neighborhood; extent of injury of individuals and their families; damage degree of their houses. The closer the relation was, the more likely they would lead to post-disaster psychological crisis. Measures were put forward to help the victims to recover from the post-disaster psychological crisis according to these correlativity analyses. Only when we have full realization of the phenomena of post-disaster psychological crisis and the causes of the phenomena can we take effective crisis intervention measures and help the victims to restore their homes and livelihoods.