Study On The Lived Experience Of The Rural Elderly Immigrants In The City

With the accelerated process of urbanization and aging population in China, increasingly large rural elderly group immigrate to the urban society. They come to the city for the purpose of pension, helping take care of their grandchildren, work and so on. Influenced by the personal factors such as cultural level and economic income and the social environment factors such as the cultural gap between urban and rural areas, their life in the city is a process of re-socialization. This study uses qualitative research methods,10 rural elderly immigrants in the city were selected to carry out a semi-structural interview. Try to use the data analysis method of phenomenology, from the perspective of the rural elderly immigrants, to describe and analyze the current lived experience of the rural elderly immigrants in the city, including their real feelings in the city life, their problems, and needs and so on. The lived experience of the rural elderly immigrants in the city can be divided into two aspects:the positive and the negative. The positive lived experience includes four aspects:the satisfaction of the guarantee of daily life and diet, the happiness of enjoying family relationships, the joy of broadening life horizons and the preferential policies for public welfare. The negative lived experience includes six aspects:the reduction of self-efficacy, the conflict of life education concept, the weakening of social support, the single form of entertainment and leisure, the cumbersome of offsite Medicare reimbursement and the urban traffic problem and poor air quality. At the same time, the study divided the rural elderly immigrants in the city into three types:to work in the city, to care for the grandchildren in the city, to both care for the grandchildren and for pension, and compared their differences on the lived experience in the city. The conclusion is that, the rural elderly immigrants’ lived experience in the city include joy and sorrow, sorrow is more than joy, and the elderly who work in the city have more positive lived experience than the elderly who take care of the grandchildren, the elderly who take care of the grandchildren also have more positive lived experience than the elderly who not only take care of the grandchildren but also for pension. The reasons which cause the rural elderly immigrants to have more negative lived experience in the city, not only closely related with the old man’s own character, cultural degree and so on, but also affected by the degree of support of the old man’s family, neighborhood, community and government. Therefore, we should continue to encourage the rural elderly immigrants to make a psychological adjustment, to actively participate in the city life. While the children of the elderly should also strengthen the spiritual care for their parents, the community should actively build a platform for the rural elderly immigrants to integrate into the community, the government should constantly improve the cohesion of social security policies such as medical care and pension for the old in rural and urban areas, take kinds of measures to improve the life happiness of rural elderly immigrants in the city. Besides, the study also explores the strategy of social work intervention, through the case work, group work and community work, aims at helping the rural elderly immigrants to build their social support network, so that they can adapt the urban life as soon as possible.