A Study On The Spiritual Demands Of The Urban Empty-nest Elderly

With the rapid development of economy, the continuous improvement of people’s living standards, the gradual improvement of medical and health services, rising of longevity, the population aging process of China is accelerating gradually and the populations of the aged features in a large number are fast increasing. The implement of Family Planning Policy have led to a great deal of “4-2-1” families. The pace of living in the city is fast and children are busy who have no time to take good care of their old parents and due to the improvement of housing conditions which causes that when the sons and daughters get married, they live in different places to their parents and many people just work and live in out of the hometown where their parents live. Therefore there is a great deal of urban empty nest elderly in the cities. The pension function of family has been eroded constantly and the time of sons and daughters has been occupied by work, therefore the time they spend to take care of their parents has been reduced relatively and the “empty nest” phenomenon has been more serious. The material life for urban empty nest elderly has been improved gradually but the problem of their spiritual demands came into exist and get to impressively severe.On the basis of a lot of reading domestic and abroad literature, this paper uses the questionnaire survey and depth interview method, handed out 209 questionnaires by random sampling, and using the SPSS software to collect data for research.At the same time, in the process of in-depth interviews, collected a lot of real cases, the data statistics and case analysis, the combination more comprehensive reflect the urban empty nest elderly spiritual demands. Urban empty nest elderly is relatively independent in the life compared with the demand of material life, spiritual demands become more and more urgent. Through the investigation, the author found that compared with the economic support, they need much spiritual demands. The author does some research from three dimensions of age, gender, occupation. The study found that the urban empty nest elderly have different spiritual demands because of different age, occupation and gender. By comparing the results with the situation, the author finds the reason why the spiritual demands of urban empty nest elderlycannot be met. Article finds out the problems of elderly themselves, families, communities, and government from three aspects of the microcosmic, middle and macroscopic and puts forward corresponding countermeasures, hoping to arouse the social from all walks of life to the attention of spiritual demands of the urban empty nest elderly.