The authors used the Twenty Statements Test in 2 studies to investigate gender and country differences in the spontaneous self-descriptions of 811 college students from Hong Kong, India, Nepal, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe and 136 secondary school students from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The authors performed statistical analysis and found no significant gender differences in the percentage of responses classified as belonging to the idiocentric self in either study. However, the authors found significant Country effects in both studies for responses classified as representing the idiocentric self and some aspects of the collective self, and the authors found significant Country x Gender effects involving all 4 categories of the idiocentric self and the collective self for the college students. These findings raise questions about the generalizability of Western findings that males are more likely to espouse an independent conception of self than females. However, as the authors predicted, females were more likely to use small group self-descriptions than their male peers.
[Copyright of Journal of Social Psychology is the property of Routledge . Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00224540309598459 ]

The contribution of parental involvement and investment to children's education has been a major topic in current educational reform around the world. The purpose of this study is to identify the parental involvement and investment factors which make the greatest contribution to children's self-esteem in Hong Kong. Data for this study was obtained from questionnaires collected from a sample of about 2100 middle grade students (Grades 6-9) and their parents, as well as parents of first grade students, from 18 schools. The study employed factor analysis and Hierarchical Linear Modeling. First, the different dimensions of parental involvement and investment manifest in Hong Kong were clarified. Secondly, the association between parental involvement and investment and family socioeconomic status was estimated. Finally, whether student self-esteem is related to different types of investment and involvement after controlling the background factors was examined.
[Copyright of School Community Journal is the property of Academic Development Institute.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.adi.org/journal/]

This article draws on a longitudinal study of a group of mainland Chinese students' English learning experiences in an English medium university in Hong Kong, and explores the dynamic nature of their language learning motivation prior to and after their arrival in Hong Kong. The study identified context-mediated and self-determined elements in the participants' learning motivational discourses. The context-mediated motivational discourses echoed the societal discourses of learning, and were shaped by the contextual conditions on the Chinese mainland and in Hong Kong, including the roles of English, academic competition and medium of instruction. Through an extended socialization process, mediated by various social agents, some of these context-mediated motivational discourses became internalized and transformed into self-determined ones among many participants in later stages of their learning. The article argues for an integrated perspective, viewing learner motivation as a dynamic construct emerging from learners' interaction with contextual conditions.
[Copyright of Studies in Higher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075070802373107]

Total raw self-esteem scores of 1303 children, including Chinese children in Britain and Hong Kong and White British, were assessed by using the Self-esteem Inventory developed by Coopersmith (1967). Across all samples, the results show little differences between children of different ages, whereas statistically significant differences occur in the independent variables of ethnic groups, gender and educational aspiration. Despite the social disadvantages that the UK Chinese may face, they have significantly higher self-esteem than their Hong Kong Chinese counterparts, but have little differences from their White peers. This indicates that they are likely to have positive feelings and academic confidence in being themselves and as part of the host society. In contrast, Hong Kong children tend to have low levels of self-esteem, which may be caused by the more self-effacing and modest values in Chinese culture, a traditional authoritarian style of education or highly competitive pressures created by schools, families and society.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/014434100110380]