Exploring the Place of Fathers in Chinese Immigrant Families: A Pilot Demonstration

Abstract

Adolescence is a major transitional period in a person’s life. This move to adolescence may be uniquely challenging in the Chinese immigrant families with long-distance fathers. This is a pilot project to increase awareness of an emerging social problem caused by a pattern of long distance relationships between absentee fathers and their children in the Chinese immigrant community of Greater Vancouver region of British Columbia. This self imposed condition, perceived as a solution to money matters, may actually increase the stresses and challenges on the development of Chinese immigrant adolescents in their parental attachment, self-esteem and social relationship. Attachment was measured using the shortened version of the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (IPPA). Self-esteem was measured using the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale (RSES). A test of small random sample (N=10) was collected in a Burnaby public secondary school. It showed that out of ten, seven Chinese immigrant adolescents were from families with long-distance fathers. The project will not show any statistically significant results, because this is a small-sample exploratory study. The comparisons are being made directly by a t-test for difference of means. Therefore, what it will show is some descriptive statistics, and some non-statistical comparisons of means and ranges to demonstrate how the study, if done on a larger sample, would work.