Research on the death psychology among Chinese during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

Under the threat of the novel coronavirus, people are compelled to contemplate some ultimate existential questions, such as life and death. This study collected texts related to the death psychology from Sina Weibo, and after data cleaning, a total of 3868 Weibo texts were included. Study 1 employed grounded theory from qualitative research to explore the core categories and evolutionary mechanisms of people's psychology when facing death threats in the context of the pandemic. Study 2 utilized big data mining techniques such as topic mining and semantic network analysis to validate the effectiveness of the death psychology theory developed in qualitative research. The findings demonstrate that within the “Emotion–Cognition–Behavior-Value” framework, the implications of death threats manifest in four aspects: death anxiety, death cognition, coping efficacy, and sense of meaning. As time progresses, the study of death psychology can be segmented into four distinct phases: the tranquil phase prior to lifting pandemic restrictions, the threat phase at lifting pandemic restrictions onset, the coping phase mid-lifting pandemic restrictions, and the reformative phase post-lifting pandemic restrictions. The calculated outcomes of topic mining and semantic network analysis corroborate the coding results and theories derived from the grounded theory. This reaffirms that data mining technology can be a potent tool for validating grounded theory.