This article draws on a cultural-historical theorisation of child development alongside the Chinese concept of learning in order to study children's development in the Hong Kong Australian community in Melbourne, Australia. In particular, it aims to understand in detail how a 9-year-old child develops a learning motive under highly structured family practices. The data analysed were selected from a larger set of data involving 80 hours of video observations generated from the recording of everyday practices in three Hong Kong immigrant families. The findings indicate that encouragement plays an important role in bridging the gap between parental demands and the child's wishes, which assists the child to appropriate family values, thus facilitating the development of a learning motive and learning itself.
[Copyright of Mind, Culture, and Activity is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher’s website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2011.634941]

This study aimed to compare the adaptation of two groups of migrant Chinese adolescents with their nonmigrant peers. The migrant adolescents included 55 Chinese migrant adolescents who migrated to Australia (Chinese-Australian) and 111 China-born adolescents who migrated to Hong Kong (Chinese-Hong Kong). The nonmigrant adolescents included 157 Anglo-Australian adolescents residing in Australia and 456 Hong Kong-born Chinese adolescents residing in Hong Kong. There were three research questions in this study. First, would there be any differences in the adaptation of Chinese migrant adolescents in different societies of settlement? Second, would migrant adolescents experience more adaptation problems than nonmigrant adolescents? Third, would there be any differences in the adaptation of adolescents in the two societies, Australia and Hong Kong? It was hypothesized that: (1) mainland Chinese migrant adolescents in Hong Kong would experience more adaptation problems than Chinese migrant adolescents in Australia; (2) migrant adolescents would report better adaptation than nonmigrant adolescents; (3) adolescents in Hong Kong would report poorer adaptation than adolescents in Australia. The participants were requested to complete a questionnaire on various adaptation outcome measures including life satisfaction, self-esteem, psychological symptoms, academic satisfaction, and behaviour problems. The results indicated that Chinese-Australian adolescents reported better psychological adaptation but Chinese-Hong Kong adolescents reported better sociocultural adaptation. Adolescents resident in Australia reported higher psychological adaptation but lower sociocultural adaptation than those in Hong Kong. Migrant adolescents reported better psychological and sociocultural adaptation than their nonmigrant counterparts. The results were discussed in relation to the social and educational systems of the two societies.
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Using confirmatory factor analysis this study examines the cross-cultural generalizability of the factor structure for the Inventory of School Motivation (ISM), an instrument based on Personal Investment theory. The instrument consists of eight different scales with 43 survey items (ranging from 3 to 7 items each) and each reflecting one of eight specific dimensions: task, effort, competition, social power, affiliation, social concern, praise, and token. The factor structure was invariant over large samples of responses by Anglo-Australian (n=2,616), Migrant Australian (n=1,265), Aboriginal Australian (n=906), Hong Kong Chinese (n=697), Navajo (n=1,776), Anglo-American (n=884) and African (n=819) cultural groups of high school students. The results of factorial invariance analysis indicated that the ISM has a stable and reliable factor structure among the 7 cultural groups. Findings also provide evidence that the ISM scales are applicable to students of different cultural backgrounds; meaningful cross-cultural comparisons should use the 43 items in educational settings.
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Suicide as a cause of death among adolescents and migration as a component of population have been growing in importance. Very little research has been conducted on the connections between migration and suicidality among adolescents in Hong Kong, and so is the aim of this article. It uses census and registration data to study suicide mortality, and sample survey data collected for this purpose to investigate suicide attempt, suicide ideation, and self-injurious behavior. Relations between suicidality and socio-demographic/psychological factors replicated those found in the literature. Duration of residence was found important for the study of suicide among migrants. In both the bivariate and multivariate analyses, although the suicidality levels for short-duration (less than 10 years) adolescent migrants were very much lower than the local-born counterparts, those for the long-duration (10 years or more) migrants were very much higher. The findings support the Healthy Migrant Hypothesis and other related hypotheses in migrant mortality studies. They also reveal, in the light of the Integration Theory of Suicide, the problem of migrant integration into the host culture and society, an important social problem for the government to solve.
[Copyright of Death studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07481180600993144]