Assessment and Intervention – refers to information gathered, decisions made, and actions taken by professional caregivers to determine and provide for the needs of persons who are dying and/or the significant people in their lives, or for the bereaved.

• Cultural / socialization – considers the effect of diverse cultural and social influences on the experience of dying, death, loss, bereavement, and memorialization.  Diversity refers to the traits and characteristics that make people unique and inclusion refers to the behaviors and social norms that ensure people feel welcome.

• Religious/spiritual – considers the relationship that religious and spiritual belief systems have on the reaction to coping with dying, death, loss, bereavement, and memorialization.

• Lifespan – considers the developmental perspectives on dying, death, loss, and bereavement from the prenatal period to old age.

• Individual / personhood (including differently-abled and disenfranchised) -  considers a single human person as distinct from group, class, or family. It includes the social, cognitive, physical, interpersonal, and emotional encounters, theories and interpretations of dying, death, loss, bereavement, and memorization from the standpoint of how one self-identifies.

• Family systems – considers the social, cognitive, physical, interpersonal, and emotional encounters, theories and interpretations of dying, death, loss, bereavement, and memorialization from the standpoint of those within a group of people sharing a relational bond and commitment and who define themselves as “family”.

Professional Practice Issues -  refers to the challenges (both positive and negative) encountered by and impacting the practice of thanatology professionals

• Self-care / professional development -  refers to self-awareness regarding one’s own thanatology issues and needs for self-care, ongoing training, and professional development goals

• Evolving platforms for practice – refers to the changing practice settings and venues, such as social media, internet, and remote virtual connections for assessment and intervention.

• Ethical, moral, legal issues – refers to the personal conduct of the thanatology professional which includes behavioral expectations as defined by their specific discipline. This also refers to the influences of larger systems (global, institutional, political, systemic, etc) that impact the experience of dying, death, loss, and bereavement on individuals and the significant people in their lives as well as impacting professionals in their thanatology roles.

Contextual and Theoretical Considerations – refers to research, theories, frameworks, models, terminology, and definitions that inform and guide the practice of thanatology.  This category may include important matters of death such as demographics, epidemiology, perceptions, dying trajectories, death attitudes, death systems, evolving representations of death in the arts and media, etc.

• Historical Perspective – views the historical context, development, and the theoretical paradigms that influenced the death experience and in the development of the field of thanatology.

• Contemporary Perspective - provides the theoretical perspective, factual context and other factors which have influenced the current perspectives on the death experience and the field of thanatology.