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PurposeThis paper aims to outline the experience of choosing an appropriate methodology from the potential qualitative methods for studying acculturative experiences amongst a group of non-Chinese young people in Hong Kong. It delineates the reasons for choosing phenomenography for researching their lived acculturative experiences. The paper also briefly explains the advantages of phenomenographic research and advocates it as a potential qualitative method for investigating diverse trajectories of acculturative experiences amongst ethnic minority/immigrant populations in multicultural contexts.Design/methodology/approachResearchers have investigated the acculturation of immigrant youth across settlement societies using different theoretical frameworks, approaches, scales, surveys and questionnaires. However, little attention has been given to the research methodologies that focus on lived human experiences across acculturating groups. By adopting an integrative literature review approach, this paper examines phenomenography as one of the potential qualitative research methods to explore ethnic minority lives in multicultural contexts.FindingsGiven that acculturation is a heterogeneous social phenomenon, phenomenography can help address the issues and limitations inherent to the traditional methodological approaches to studying acculturation amongst youth with ethnic minority and immigrant backgrounds.Practical implicationsResearchers in comparative, intercultural and multicultural education may benefit from phenomenography by exploring the different ways immigrants and ethnic minority populations experience acculturation in multicultural contexts.Originality/valueThis paper outlines the authors' first-hand experiences who sought to identify an appropriate qualitative research method for studying acculturative experiences amongst a group of non-Chinese secondary school students in Hong Kong. Based on their extensive research experiences in the interpretative research tradition, the authors propose phenomenography as a promising method for exploring the diverse trajectories of acculturation amongst ethnic minority and immigrant youth in multicultural contexts.

This article attempts to locate Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities at the intersection of discourses between ethnic diversity, immigration, citizenship and identity. The literature informs categorizing and matching Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities, ascribing different characteristics attached to each category. This helps conceptualize the positionality of ethnic minorities in Asia’s ‘world city’, Hong Kong. The article is informed by in-depth interviews with twenty ethnic minority young people who provided perspectives on their constructions and negotiation of identity.

Acculturation is an emerging field of inquiry in the multicultural context of Hong Kong. Behavioural acculturation focuses mainly on cultural practices such as language use, dietary preferences, cu...

Scholars have extensively studied acculturation from different theoretical perspectives among immigrants across the societies of settlement. However, there is a dearth of knowledge about acculturation from a culture learning approach in Hong Kong. This article reports the acculturative challenges among sixteen (16) Pakistani students from six different secondary schools in Hong Kong. The phenomenographic data analysis of semi-structured interviews revealed four categories of everyday experiences in schools that hinder their acculturation. These are mainly related to inter-ethnic interactions, sensitivity towards diverse learning and sociocultural needs, and the Chinese language teaching curriculum for non-Chinese speaking students. Although the study reports Pakistani students' experiences, the findings may also translate the acculturative challenges among students with an immigrant or ethnic minority background in settlement societies. The article also discusses both the theoretical and practical implications for studying and helping immigrant young people in multicultural contexts.

Acculturative stress has repeatedly been shown to heighten depressive symptoms. However, the explanatory process between acculturative stress and depressive symptoms has been understudied, particularly in the Chinese context. This prospective study aims to investigate emotion regulation difficulties as a mechanism between acculturative stress and depressive symptoms. A sample of 154 Mainland Chinese female university students (Mage = 21.10; SD = 2.13) were recruited in Hong Kong 3 times, with a 4-month lag between assessment points. Mediation findings converged to suggest between-person indirect effect of acculturative stress on symptoms of depression via emotion regulation difficulties, above and beyond established mediators including self-stigma and social support. Specifically, greater acculturative stress was related to a higher level of emotion regulation difficulties. In turn, greater emotion regulation difficulties were related to a higher level of depressive symptoms. The stress-generating effect of depression via emotion regulation was not simultaneously supported. These findings are informative to researchers and practitioners aiming to alleviate depressive symptoms, particularly in the Chinese context of higher education that often involves intercultural contact and stress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The question of a sense of belonging to a host society is paramount to the study of acculturation in the society of settlement. The study of acculturation seeks to examine how acculturating people ...

This study investigates the perceptions of teaching competency in multicultural classrooms held by 421 teachers at 16 schools in Hong Kong. The aims of the study are (a) to use confirmatory factor analysis to validate a culturally appropriate version of the Multicultural Teaching Competency Scale (MTCS), (b) to assess three types of multicultural-teaching competency, and (c) to provide recommendations for teacher-education institutes and policy makers on developing effective training in multicultural education. The results indicate that a tripartite model assessing skills, knowledge, and relationships, the core features of multicultural-teaching competency as assessed by the MTCS from a Hong Kong sample. The teachers all identified multicultural-teaching relationships as the most important component of multicultural-teaching competency. Future researchers should examine the concurrent validity of the MTCS and the cultural contexts of multicultural-teaching relationships. Recommendations are also made for incorporating the Confucian beliefs of fairness, justice, and equity into multicultural classroom.

This design-based research (DBR) project aimed to develop apt in-class and out-of-class teacher facilitation strategies to be employed in a pedagogic integration of flipped learning and social enquiry learning, viz., FIBER (Flipped Issue-Based Enquiry Ride), with respect to upper-, average-, and lower-academic classrooms. The research was conducted in the formal learning and teaching context of senior secondary social humanities education in Hong Kong, involving nine teachers (from nine different schools at three different academic bands) and their Secondary-5 (Grade-11) classes (with a total of 610 students) in two consecutive school years. Apart from delineating the evidence-based teacher facilitation practices that we designed, enacted and evaluated in the DBR process, this paper also discusses the principles that we derived in accordance with these practices. The present work provides both researchers and educators with new insights into developing adequate teacher facilitation strategies when adopting flipped learning in social humanities education and upon different formal schooling settings.

The context of Hong Kong has not always been favourable for the integration of ethnic minorities, who face various difficulties in education, employment, and daily life. Research, however, has show...

Although the attitude of students toward academic cheating has been an important variable in academic misconduct research, few researchers have examined the factor structure of cheating attitudes. The current research analyzed the factor structure of an important scale in this area—the Attitudes toward Cheating (ATC) scale. The findings of the current research revealed a three-factor solution of academic cheating: conservativeness in the cheating accusation, justification of cheating, and perceived immorality of cheating students. In addition, the three factors that were identified were only weakly correlated; meaning that cheating attitudes are multi-faceted. Therefore, the common practice of calculating an overall ATC scale score may not be adequate for fully capturing cheating attitudes. Finally, the current paper serves as an example of how to employ the powerful statistical technique of exploratory structural equation modeling.

The theory of planned behaviour was used to examine academic dishonesty among secondary school students in Hong Kong. Participants were 386 students in Forms 1–3 (Grades 7–9). Attitudes toward chea...

Despite the growing population of Mainland Chinese students at the local government-funded universities in Hong Kong, little is known about their acculturation experiences and psychosocial adjustment. Drawing on an acculturation framework (Berry, 2003) and theories of coping (Folkman, 1984), resilience (Masten, 2001), and socioecological processes (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), this article provides an in-depth account of acculturative stress and coping behaviors experienced by Mainland Chinese university students in Hong Kong. Using qualitative research methods, we conducted seven focus groups with a total of 32 Mainland Chinese students from a public university in Hong Kong over a 3-month period. Analytic strategy included identifying the unit of analysis, coding, sorting code, checking code, and creating salient themes. Findings suggested that Mainland Chinese university students faced acculturative stress stemming from "language barriers," "prejudice and discrimination," "cultural differences," and "transport, food, and accommodation." The study also found that the participants used a number of adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies in the face of acculturative stress. As an extension of this research, future studies should examine the subtle difference between a subculture (Hong Kong) and its mother culture (Mainland China) and how that affects acculturative stress. Implications of these findings are discussed at the levels of theory, policy, and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record

The predictors of attitudes regarding academic plagiarism were investigated in Hong Kong secondary school students. The participants were 257 Grade 10 and 11 students who were taking liberal studies. Quantitative analysis showed that the students were unfamiliar with what actions constituted plagiarism. The best predictor of attitudes was the perceived descriptive norm regarding plagiarism (i.e., perception of the frequency of plagiarism in one’s environment). We explain this finding by applying the cultural-self perspective and present our recommendations for teachers.