The influence of culture and spirituality on maternal grief following stillbirth in China: A qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Stillbirth is a unique phenomenon with various manifestations influenced by cultural contexts and spiritual beliefs. Chinese cultural and spiritual practices produce different post-stillbirth grief experiences for bereaved mothers in China. However, the majority of research on perinatal loss and grief has been conducted in Western cultures. In the Chinese cultural context, the post-stillbirth grief experience of bereaved mothers may differ from the types of Western bereavement examined in the dominant research. OBJECTIVE: This study investigated the influence of culture and spirituality on grieving mothers who had experienced a stillbirth in China. METHODS: This qualitative study was grounded in an interpretivist constructionist epistemology. In-depth interviews were conducted with mothers who had experienced a stillbirth within the previous year. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. FINDINGS: A total of 28 women were interviewed by trained interviewers. Three key themes were identified: 1) The influence of culture on grief expression, with four subthemes: restrained expressions of grief, unattainable mourning ceremonies, hospital policy as a barrier to grieving, and others-oriented self; 2) Cultural characteristics of post-stillbirth experiences, with four subthemes: paternalistic medical culture, "Kong yuezi", embarrassment during postpartum visits, and cultural taboos on dealing with deceased babies' possessions; and 3) Finding significance in spiritual healing process, with four subthemes: seeking meaning in the event, accepting and reconciling with the event, reshaping beliefs and views about life and death, and achieving personal growth. CONCLUSION: Chinese culture and spirituality have different influences on bereaved mothers' expressions of grief and post-stillbirth healing. This research demonstrates specific aspects of spirituality that contribute to or hinder the grieving process and the different roles of Chinese culture and spirituality for individuals. The findings suggest the need for the development of culturally sensitive interventions and support systems to assist mothers in navigating grief and healing. Future studies could explore the roles of Chinese culture and spirituality over time in the different stages of grief and healing after stillbirth.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".