Resilience in Chinese migrant women in Hong Kong : conceptualization, measurement, and association with adaptation outcomes

Abstract

Mainland Chinese migrant women comprise a substantial portion of Hong Kong's population. While evidences show that such women experience acculturative stress and are vulnerable to the development of poor mental health, some migrants show positive adaptation outcomes regardless of their adverse circumstances. What enables these migrants to "bounce back" from adversities? The development of the resilience framework marks a paradigm-shift in acculturation research by focusing on migrants' strengths rather than their problems. Resilience has been widely explored and has been found to be closely related to adaptation outcomes. However, there is no direct equivalent of this western construct in the Chinese context. Investigation into Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism has indicated that the way resilience is conceptualized significantly differs compared to that in the west. There is thus a need to integrate the etic and emit approaches to arrive at a culturally sensitive conceptualization and measurement of resilience in Chinese migrants, and to explore the association between resilience and adaptation outcomes. In pursuit of these research goals, two studies are proposed. Study one entails the application of qualitative and the quantitative methods to develop a culturally relevant resilience scale. In the qualitative inquiry, in-depth interviews were conducted with 20 Mainland Chinese migrant women to understand their narratives relating to resilience. An item pool was generated to create a measurement tool for the resilience process. A new measure of resilience, the Resilience Scale for Chinese Migrant (RSCM), was developed, whose psychometric properties were tested in 417 Mainland Chinese migrant women. The finalized 30-item RSCM assesses resilience in four domains: personal competence, cultural beliefs, community resources, and positive perception of their host city. The RSCM showed satisfactory internal consistency reliability; convergent and incremental validity. The person-focused approach yields favourable adaptation outcomes in Resilient participants who had a higher level of resilience than those of the Maladaptive participants, suggesting that a higher level of resilience contributes to better adaptation outcomes when migrants are under high acculturative stress. The variable-focused approach finds that both cultural and generic components of resilience can predict depression, anxiety, stress, and post-migration growth and these components mediate the effect of acculturative stress on adaptation outcomes. A resilience model of acculturation and adaptation is proposed, which encompasses socio-demographic characteristics, acculturative stress, resilience, depression, anxiety, stress, quality of life, and post-migration growth. The research contributes to theory and research by providing a process-oriented and culturally sensitive conceptualization of resilience. Moreover, the resilience model of acculturation provides a broader understanding of adaptation outcomes, recognizes the role of cultural beliefs in promoting positive adaptation, and allows for the exploration of the process through which growth occurs. In practice, an integrated intervention model is proposed to achieve positive adaptation outcomes by addressing migrants' multi-faceted needs.