Chinese Adolescents’ Adaptation in New York City

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This presentation is a preliminary report of our ongoing research project on the adaptation of 150 Chinese-American youths to the living environment in New York City. Following Sung’s (1987) groundbreaking study, we have attempted to address similar issues with a focus on the psychological factors that mediate sociocultural and behavioral variables. To serve this purpose, new research instruments were developed, including a Background Questionnaire for collecting basic information about the participants, a semi-projective Sentence Completion Test, and a semi-structured Qualitative Interview composed of 41 open-ended questions about the interviewees’ self-image, their identities as Chinese Americans, their family situation, their view of gender roles, attitudes toward family, peers, friends, school, and teachers, extracurricular activities, homework, and dating practices.

Participants’ responses gathered so far suggest that 1) in spite of the relatively low socioeconomic status and frequent English language problems in their families, many Chinatown youths have fought against all odds to become academically successful; 2) Chinatown youths’ success can be attributed to a large extent to the core cultural emphasis on education which is deeply rooted in Confucianism as well as a perennial sense of predicament; 3) due to the difficulty of adjusting to the American-dominated system, a considerable number of Chinatown youth made different life-course decisions to drop out of school and turn toward various forms of underground business.

The participants report that many of their parents are following relatively traditional childrearing practices, such as emphasizing children’s obligations toward their family together with sustained efforts to succeed academically. The parents rarely employ positive reinforcement vis-à-vis their children and typically do not display overt signs of affection. Many youths indicate a deep sense of indebtedness toward their parents who work very long hours and have made numerous sacrifices to ensure the well being and positive future of their children.

We conclude that Chinatown youths are traditional in the sense of maintaining the living (and functional) faith of their ancestors but that they refuse to endorse the more barren and non-adaptive forms of Chinese traditionalism.

Online Notes

Author Bio

Presented By:

Ting Lei grew up in a multi-ethnic environment in Taiwan, where he received his B.S. in Psychology in 1980. His honors thesis was based on his empirical study of the socio-moral reasoning of 53 students who came from different SES and cultural backgrounds. Lei earned his M. A. at the University of Minnesota with a thesis entitled “The development of moral, political, and legal reasoning in Chinese societies” in 1981.

He completed his doctoral study with developmental psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg and cultural anthropologist Robert LeVine at Harvard University in 1983. In the following decade Lei worked as a research fellow with anthropologists, sociologists, as well as psychologists at the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica. During that decade, Lei participated in cultural/semiotic anthropologists’ field research projects on aborigines and minorities which resulted in several documentaries at the Margaret Mead Film Festival. He also collaborated with sociologists in a comparative study of the value changes of Chinese students, and extended his initial explorative study of socio-moral reasoning to a longitudinal study that included 212 participants of different ages and ethnicities.

In 1993, Lei was recruited by sociologist Alex Inkeles at Stanford University to join a research project on the democratic reasoning of Chinese people, and relocated to New York, where he has been teaching Developmental Psychology at the City University of New York and Cross-cultural Psychology as well as Anthropology at St. John’s University. Lei has been involved in a comparative study that includes African-Americans, Chinese, and Dominicans, as well as an in-depth research project headed by Uwe Gielen on the adaptation of Chinese immigrants in New York City. Currently, Lei is the only naturalized citizen serving on the Steering Committee (Advisory Board) at the New York Academy of Sciences. He is also an Associate at the Institute of International & Cross-Cultural Psychology in St. Francis College. Lei’s immediate family is rainbow in color, including children of Armenian, Chinese, German, Jewish, and Russian descents.


Presented By:

Uwe P. Gielen (Ph.D. in Social Psychology, Harvard University) is Professor-Emeritus of Psychology and Executive Director of the Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Psychology at St. Francis College, New York. His work centers on cross-cultural and international psychology, Chinese American immigrant youth, international family psychology, and moral development. Dr. Gielen is the senior editor or coeditor of 28 volumes that have appeared in five languages. They include "Childhood and Adolescence: Cross-Cultural Perspectives and Applications"; "Families in Global Perspective"; and "Toward a Global Psychology." He has served as president of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research, the International Council of Psychologists, and the International Psychology Division of the American Psychology Association.