Family Mobility Research Articles

How families affect aspirational migration amidst political insecurity: The case of Hong Kong

AbstractThe migration literature has examined migrants' political motivations separately from their family's mobility strategies in the face of macro‐political uncertainties. Bridging the two bodies of literature, this study analyses how parental status moderates the relationship between individual political considerations and migration intentions in an increasingly tense political climate. Based on the quantitative data on political protests in Hong Kong, we find that migration intention increases both with mobilisation by protestors and repression by the government. While more active protestors are less likely to migrate, parents who have participated in the protests tend to have a stronger intention to migrate. Our qualitative data explain that despite parent protestors' commitment to the pro‐democratic protests, their encounters with law enforcement create a strong migration intention to ensure their children's political freedom and physical safety. While pro‐government citizens have less intention to migrate than pro‐democracy citizens, both are likely to migrate if they have children. Interviews show that pro‐government citizens' migration hopes for their children's future are de‐politicised. Finally, future‐oriented characteristics of migration motivates parents to prioritise their children's prospects over their obligations to their ageing parents. This study therefore contributes to the understanding of the relationship among migration, politics, and family life.

Furniture Exempt from Seizure: African-American Farm Families and Their Property in Texas, 1880s-1930s

The real and personal property that African-American farm families accumu? lated between the 1880s and the 1930s can tell a lot about the political consciousness ofthe disfranchised at the height of African-American landowner? ship. Farm women and their families invested their limited financial and labor resources into household equipment and furnishings, knick-knacks and per? sonal adornment, land, and homes. They used the legal system to secure their property and convey it to heirs even as unscrupulous landlords conspired against them. But purchasing land could limit a family's mobility, disrupt kinship networks, and constrain their ability to purchase other products of the modern consumer age, most notably automobiles. Irrefutably, the white mid? dle class defined consumer culture and the characteristics of modernization in the rural South, not the black farm families, but rural African Americans still had to feed, clothe, and house their families. Their choices became the object of analysis and ridicule by reformers during the early twentieth century. By the 1930s the small homes that once housed aspiring families became the symbols of poverty even as rural reformers and the Progressive farmers they served celebrated a rural aesthetic that advocated recycling and thrifty management.

Teaching Research Methods to Undergraduates

Research methods may be the most difficult course to teach at the undergraduate level. Students are intimidated by the material from the start, and they sometimes construct barriers so formidable that teaching them about cross-tabulation and chi square analysis becomes all but impossible. One of the reasons they chose to major in communications, after all, was so they could avoid doing math. How dare instructors ask them to compute the mean, variance and standard deviati on for a set of scores? What do these things have to do with operating a television camera or writing an effective lead? They are an important part of a liberal education, as Markham (1991) explains: Students need to understand the logic of scientific research. They need to know how to look for pattern in the chaos of life. They need to learn how to formulate generalizations about relationships between variables based on careful data gathering, rather than on over-generalization from personal experience or a blind acceptance of cultural myths. They need to understand that tentative generalizations must be subjected to rigorous testing to see how well they hold up and how widely they apply (pp. 466-67). Indeed, research methods can play an important role in undergraduate education, especially in the field of mass communication (see, for example, Meyer,1973, 1991; Bolding, 1996). Students should understand how poll numbers are concocted by groups with specific agendas, and they also should appreciate how a report showing candidate A leading candidate B may actually be a story about a dead heat (Singletary,1994; see also Wimmer & Dominick, 1994; Kerlinger, 1986). They need to understand when to apply the three measures of central tendency, and they should know the difference between a rating and a share. In short, they need to understand how to think critically about phenomena, for as Paulos (1995) has written, (u)ncritical news-gathering routines tend to bolster the conventional wisdom. They're too often anchored to `what everybody knows,' to simplistic analogies, to whatever is psychologically available (p. 18). Undergraduate students often submit papers loaded with hyperbole and allinclusive statements; the methods course helps them develop an appreciation for the tentative nature of knowledge. It demonstrates how hypotheses supported in one study may or may not be supported in another, depending on the conditions under which the latter is conducted, and it illustrates the need to back away from commonsense reasoning and conceptualize problems in general, abstract terms (for example, Tichenor & McLeod, 1989; Babbie, 1990,1986; Singleton, et al. 1988). Students learn about the problems associated with post hoc, after-the-fact hypothesizing and discover the strengths of making predictions about the relationships between variables. They also learn about the difference between prediction and causality, thus helping them become more broad-minded in their approach to problems. Before completing the course, a student might take a tragic news story, such as a child burning down his family's mobile home and killing his sister after viewing MTV's Beavis & Butt-Head, and attempt to make general statements about the relationship between television exposure and anti-social behavior. After completing the course, the student might be more conservative in considering the problem and may question whether a relationship would be present if data were aggregated across many children. Ultimately, the methods class helps to teach students that a certain behavior may be the result of several factors-that social and behavioral science is much more complex than the idea of simple causation would suggest (Tichenor & McLeod, p. 18). Apart from issues of pedagogy, the undergraduate methods course can play an important policy role by increasing the centrality of communications study to the three-fold mission of land-grant universities. …

Mother's Occupational Status and Children's Schooling

After a long tradition of research on the intergenerational mobility of men, stratification studies in the late 1970s and 1980s began to include women in their analyses. Most studies, however, still rely primarily on characteristics offathers to measure family background status. Using a large national cross-sectional data set, this study describes the influence of mother's occupational status on children's educational attainment. I compare the strengths of maternal and paternal influences and use birth cohorts to examine whether the relative influence of mothers has changed. The main findings are: Maternal occupational status has a strong effect on schooling, this effect is independent offather's education and occupation, it persists through the schooling career, and it is as important for sons asfor daughters. Some evidence suggests that the influence of mother's occupation has increased while the influence offather's occupation has decreased. In contrast, mother's education has always been as important as father's education. In general, the findings underscore the positive effects of maternal labor force participation on child outcomes through the high-status jobs many married women now hold. At the same time, this study suggests that the independent influence of mother's socioeconomic status may lead to an accumulation of educational advantages and disadvantages in subsequent generations, possibly reducing the intergenerational mobility offamilies.