Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China.
Urban Governance and Design Thrust, Society Hub, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou 511458, China.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 May 25;19(11):6433. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19116433.
Although the twenty-first century is deemed as a new era of globalization, waves of immigration continue, due to disparities between politically and economically unstable regions and Western democratized and developed countries. Immigration research has therefore reignited its attention on the successful adaptation of immigrants' offspring, which has profound implications for Western immigrant-receiving countries, as well as worldwide stability. Although immigration research mainly informed by the conventional assimilation theory and/or segmented assimilation perspective accentuates the importance of structural factors, termed as social forces here, in relation to immigrant children's successful adaptation in adolescence, an argument of determinism and tenability keeps on and the contribution of human mental resources and determination, termed as mental forces here, in shaping life trajectories of immigrant children should be not ignored. For this, with a representative sample of 3344 immigrant children from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), we examined and compared both the effects of social and mental forces measured in adolescence of immigrant children on their multiple adaptation outcomes in terms of college graduation, engagement in postgraduate study, and first and current job attainments in young adulthood with a Bayesian multilevel modeling framework. The results found that both social forces of segmented assimilation theory and mental forces of immigrant children in adolescence were significantly predictive of immigrant children's successful adaptation in young adulthood (OR = 1.088-2.959 and β = 0.050-0.639 for social forces; OR = 11.290-18.119 and β = 0.293-0.297 for mental forces), in which, although the latter showed stronger effects than the former, the effects of mental forces on adaptation of immigrant children were conditionally shaped by the contexts of the social forces informed by segmented assimilation theory. The findings of the current study highlight the significance of the organism-environment interaction perspective on immigration research and provide an insight to consider a context-driven response thesis proposed.
尽管 21 世纪被认为是全球化的新时代，但由于政治和经济不稳定地区与西方民主化和发达国家之间的差距，移民浪潮仍在继续。因此，移民研究再次关注移民后代的成功适应问题，这对西方移民接收国以及全球稳定都具有深远意义。尽管移民研究主要以传统的同化理论和/或分割同化观点为指导，强调结构性因素（这里称为社会力量）与移民儿童在青春期成功适应的重要性，但决定论和可持性的争论仍在继续，人类心理资源和决心（这里称为心理力量）在塑造移民儿童的生活轨迹方面的作用也不应忽视。为此，我们使用《移民儿童纵向研究》（CILS）中的 3344 名移民儿童的代表性样本，使用贝叶斯多层次建模框架，检验和比较了青春期移民儿童的社会力量和心理力量对其多项适应结果的影响，这些适应结果包括大学毕业、研究生学业参与以及成年早期的第一份和当前工作。结果发现，分割同化理论的社会力量和青春期移民儿童的心理力量都显著预测了移民儿童在成年早期的成功适应（社会力量的 OR = 1.088-2.959 和 β = 0.050-0.639；心理力量的 OR = 11.290-18.119 和 β = 0.293-0.297），尽管后者的影响大于前者，但心理力量对移民儿童适应的影响取决于分割同化理论所提供的社会力量背景。本研究的结果强调了移民研究中生物体-环境相互作用观点的重要性，并提供了一个视角，即考虑到提出的基于背景的反应假说。
