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ABSTRACT
The second-generation immigrants’ advantage in education has been observed in many destination countries, and often explained in terms of their family values and practices embedded with certain culture and positive selection on psychological factors. However, the roles of culture and selectivity have been hardly disentangled from each other. In this article, we examine the self-selection hypothesis in the context of Hong Kong, as its unique setting enables us to largely control for the effect of cultural factors and focus on the positive selection effect. We identify four psychological traits that could contribute to immigrants’ outstanding performance, and employ mediation analysis to investigate how much of the effect of immigrant status on academic achievement is mediated through these factors. Analysis of data from the Programme for International Student Assessment in Hong Kong reveals that, having strong motivations to find a better life and high aspirations for upward mobility can largely explain Chinese immigrant children’s academic success in Hong Kong, with educational aspiration playing a particularly important role. In addition, the net academic advantage of second-generation immigrants is larger among low socio-economic status (SES) families, and low SES immigrant parents have exceptionally high expectation and great dedication to their children’s education.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Xiaogang Wu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0294-629X
Notes
*An earlier version of this article was presented in the annual meeting of the North American Chinese Sociologists Association (NACSA), Chicago, IL, USA, 21 August 2015.
1. According to the World Value Survey, despite the variations in levels of modernization and democracy, Hong Kong and mainland China (as well as several other East Asian societies like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) are culturally proximate to each other (Inglehart and Welzel Citation2010).
2. Liu and Xie (Citation2016) suggest that, some of the cultural factors unique to East Asian groups may have helped to weaken the effect of family SES on educational outcomes. For instance, East Asians tend to believe that children from a disadvantaged social background are capable of achieving upward mobility as long as they are willing to put in persistently strong effort in education. This explanation, however, may not be empirically tested, as the cultural effect cannot be disentangled from selectivity effect.
3. We drop those first-generation immigrant students in our analytic sample for two reasons. First, while the first generation’s disadvantage is due mostly to the disruption of schooling/work and their positions as newcomers, second-generation immigrants have much more in common with their native peers, as they were born and grew up in the same country. The comparison between second-generation immigrants to natives in general can better measure immigrants’ level of adaptation (Schleicher Citation2006). Second, among the 15 year olds on which PISA focused, first-generation immigrant students are grossly overrepresented in grades below the modal grade attended by most local-born students, because immigrant parents (and schools) have strategically place their children in a lower grade to increase their competiveness at school when they moved to Hong Kong (Pong Citation2009), and those first-generation immigrants who are in the same grade with same-age local children are likely to be positively selected on abilities or other unobserved characteristics. In addition, since the PISA survey only asked the birthplaces of students’ and their parents’, there is no way to identify those third- or higher- generation immigrants in the data available.
4. As no direct measure of family income/wealth is available from the PISA data, the existence of household items is used as an approximate measure of family wealth. These household items include: a desk for study, a room of your own, a quiet place to study, a computer you can use for school work, educational software, a link to the Internet, you own calculator, classic literature, books of poetry, works of art, books to help with your school work a dictionary, a dishwasher. In addition, the index also includes a dummy variable indicating more than 100 books (derived from a question on the number of books at home) (OECD Citation2005b).
5. As approximately 30% of the sample has missing values for the occupational aspiration variable, we performed imputation by running a linear regression on a series of variables including immigrant status, gender, school grade, family ESCS, school average ESCS, and academic achievements.
6. These studies use a single independent variable as illustration, but other covariates can be easily included in each step of the procedure.
7. Specifically, the test equation is as follows: .
8. Due the limited space, we only present results for mathematic achievement. Results for reading and science literacy, available upon request, exhibit similar patterns.
9. Parents’ educational aspiration is measured in the same way as students’ educational aspiration in 2003 survey, with higher scores indicating higher expectations. The other three variables, parents’ attitudes toward mathematics, involvement in children’s school, and support for children, are constructed from a variety of items listed in Appendix. Higher scores indicate more positive attitudes towards the value of mathematics in job market, higher level of involvement in children’s school activities, and more everyday support for children’s study, respectively. Lastly, education cost measures the money parents have paid for children’s tuition fees and tutoring in previous year.