An Exploratory Qualitative Survey upon Self-perception of Future Aging Life within Chinese Homosexual Youths

Abstract

With the advent of an aging society, providing for old adults has been an inevitable and emerging task demanded to deal with, so does China. It is revealed that aging life quality would be in line with the perception of aging significantly. Also, in view of the invisible but considerable homosexual population existing in China, this survey seeks to understand and outline Chinese homosexual youths’ self-perception of their coming aging life. As it might be helpful for both homosexual youths per se and the general public to deepen their perception of aging and prepare for the aging life better. In this survey(N=25), qualitative research methods, snowball sampling and intensive interviews were employed, whose implementation was mediated by instant messaging technologies. After coding collected data according to principles of Grounded Theory, two dimensions: the self-perception of (1) aging process and (2) providing for aging life, were turned out to represent Chinese homosexual youths’ self-perception of their aging life. That could be generally stated as a relatively optimistic prospection, albeit with their perceived negative factors against aging successfully.