Social sciences study various aspects of death and the process of dying. Demographics, epidemiology, and statistics gather aggregate data about the number of deaths per year; causes of death; age of deceased; gender, class, and race differences in deaths and causes of deaths, etc.  Psychology focuses on the psychological reactions of people on their own mortality, and mortality, dying, or death of others. Sociology, anthropology, and history study socio-cultural customs and practices related to dying and death. At different times, different societies have practiced different methods of disposition of the body after death (burial, cremation, mummification, etc.). while care for dying, for most of human history, has taken place in domestic settings, in developed countries in the second half of the 20th century a lot of the care for have been transferred to institutions – nursing homes and hospitals. One more topic of interest is how different religions explain what happens after death, with the two most common answers being a transition to some type of place (heaven or hell) or reincarnation. Attitudes about the deliberate ending of somebody’s life – abortion, corporal punishment, euthanasia, infanticide, geronticide, self-defense, killing the enemy in the war, etc. – have varied across cultures, times, and individuals. The economic cost of care for a dying person and burial cost can be significant, especially in countries where those costs are not covered by state-covered social and medical security. Today there is a rising interdisciplinary field of death studies and the two scholarly journals devoted to the topic -  Omega: The Journal of Death and Dying and Death Studies.

In Morals and Markets (1979), Viviana Zelizer examines changes in approaches to life insurance, in order to explore changes in understanding the role of family members. While in the 18th century, families that were left without a father were taken care of by the wider family and neighbors, at the end of the 19th century there was a transformation from a "gift" economy to a market economy. In the market economy, a social expectation has been established that a father, that is, a man, should protect his family even after death. To achieve that, the practice of paying for life insurance spread, so the practice of life insurance, from immoral economic behavior, became responsible behavior towards the rest of the family.

In the books Western Attitudes towards Death (1974) and The Hour of Our Death (1981, in French 1977) Phillipe Ariès studied how our relationship to death has changed throughout history. While in pre-modern times death was seen as something familiar and omnipresent, preparation for which came gradually over time, in modern times death started to be seen as a forbidden topic, it became ‘‘invisible,’’ an enemy that has to be fought and scorned. 

In the book Awareness of Dying (1965), Anselm Strauss and Barney Glaser introduced the concept of „awareness context“, which pertains to awareness of dying patients, that are in hospital care, of their incoming deaths.  Glaser and Strauss distinguished four types of awareness contexts: closed awareness, suspicion awareness, mutual pretense awareness, and open awareness. Closed awareness context relates to patients who are unaware of their health status, while the staff of the hospital knows patients' prospects. In the suspicion awareness context, the patient suspects that the staff thinks that they are about to die, but the staff doesn’t reveal that to the patient. Mutual pretense awareness context exists in situations when both patients and staff know that the patients are dying but are pretending otherwise. Open awareness context pertains to situations when both staff and patients know and acknowledge that the patient is dying. Dying tends to occur in three ways: lingering, expected quick, and unexpected quick. The unexpected quick death is hardest for both family members and health workers.  

Elizabeth Kubler Ross, in On Death and Dying (1969), introduced the notion of emotional and cognitive stages - denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – that somebody who is dying goes through.  

References:

Ariès, Phillipe. Western Attitudes towards Death (1974);

     -     The Hour of Our Death (1977)

Blauner, Robert. “Death and Social Structure”, in Psychiatry (1966);

Foucault. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973, in French 1963);

     -     Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977, in French 1975);

Hertz. Death and the Right Hand (1960, in French 1907 and 1909);

Ross, Elizabeth Kubler. On death and dying (1969);

Strauss, Anselm and Barney Glaser. Awareness of Dying (1965);

Zelizer. Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States (1979);

     -     Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (1985).