Convergence And Differentiation--Boat Peoples' Status Attainment And Social Capital In Xincai

This paper focuses on boat people's status attainment in Xin cai county, China. By comparing Blau-Duncan's model with Lin nan's social capital model, we prefer Linnan's model to explain boat people's status attainment. After testing the different importance of factors such as policies, social capital and human capital, we point out that social capital is the most important inner factor and policy factor is the least to boat people's status attainment.On the one hand, most boat people in Xin cai haven't got enough education and vocational training, they tend to converge; but on the other side, they tend to differ on occupation, income, social capital and the influence of policy.There is some coherence and variance between my conclusion and Blau-Duncan's. The coherence is that we both find education, the first occupation and father's occupation are important factors to one's status attainment. The difference is the different effect of factors. In Blau-Duncan's model, the education is the first important, the first occupation is the second, and father's occupation is the third, but in my conclusion, the education is the first important, the second is father's occupations, and the third is the first occupation. Social capital is a pivotal factor to boat people's status attainment both for all the samples of boat people and for the different processes of different generations. And Blau-Duncan's model is not as convincing as Lin nan's social capital model.After comparing the different effect of human capital, policy and social capital on the status, we find that boat people's status attainment is more evidently affected by social capital and human capital, but polices have no significant effect on boat people's status attainment.Boat people's social status and their social capital are affected each other. The effect of social capital on status is larger than the effect of status on social capital.There are some innovations as follows:1,The dissertation provides a new direction and opens new space for the study of boat people. The old studies on boat people are focused on the culture and religion in the Anthropology perspective, with the qualitative analysis. But in this study, I use the quantitative analysis to study boat people's status attainment since 1949,which is a break, a pioneer.2,In this dissertation, I find out the better model to explain boat people's status attainment. As we all know, Blau-Duncan's model is thought as the most classic. But when I use boat people's data to test, I find that model is not good as Lin nan's social capital model. After adding social capital to Blau-Duncan's model, R2 improved. This is to say, social capital is the most important factor to boat people's status attainment.And Lin nan's social capital model is better than Blau-Duncan's model to explain boat people's status attainment.3,The dissertation tests some hypothesizes and Propositions, stands by Lin nan's social capital theory. In Lin nan's social capital theory, social network and social resource is put into Blau-Duncan's model of status attainment, and there are two models ,one is the accessed social capital model, the other is the mobilization of social capital.My results testifies Lin nan's three propositions:(a) the social resources proposition: that social resources exert effect on the outcome of an instrumental action,(b)the strength of position proposition: that social resources ,in turn, are effected by the original position of ego, and(c)the strength of ties proposition: that social resources are also affected by the use of weaker rather than stronger ties.