Group Work In The Construction Of Mutual Support Network For The Urban Solitary Elderly

Since the 21 st century, China has rapidly stepped into the aging period. Studies of elderly people have quickly become not only the focus of scholars but also a hot topic of the public. Most scholars payed a lot of attention on the status, problems and countermeasures of seniors in perspective of sociology, social security, management and psychology, but there was little or no research on urban elderly retirement in the perspective of social work. Therefore, in this paper, the author aimed to interpret solitary elderly endowment demands in G community in Nanchang city and explore the possibility and necessity of group work intervention by using methods of questionnaire survey and field interview so as to formulate specific intervention plans and activities for the urban living-alone old.Through the early stage of needs assessment, the author found that the solitary elder lacked both informal support and communication between each other, and as a result they lived a lonely life. In order to solve problems like “not going out” and "spiritual emptiness" of the solitary old, the author tried to build a community support network for them by five group activities with professional methods based on the theory of social support and perspective of advantages. From the evaluation, we knew that the mutual aid network made by those who share the same endowment needs improved their ability to adapt society, enhances their self-efficacy, stably and constantly strengthened their mutual relationship and efficiently relieved their spiritual emptiness and loneliness. In the last part, the paper discussed how to consolidate and maintain the mutual aid network relations and further to realize the "old-age self-help".