Adversity And Adjustment: Family Resilience In Rural-urban Migrant Family

Large-scale population flow is an important phenomenon in China’s economic and socialtransformation period. It’s also the inevitable trend in the urban-rural integration development. Inthe rural to urban population migration, family migration and the long-term staying in city isincreasing. It’s the involving economic, political, social, psychological, and cultural changes inthis migration process. The rural-urban migrant family faced with multiple difficulties andchallenges to adapt to city life. In this paper, with the perspective of ecological system, toanalysis the migrant family’s social environment and living conditions, and positively interprethow the migrant family dealing with challenges and making adjustment, also the functioningprocess of family resilience.As a qualitative research, this research uses the literature method, photovoice, and in-depthinterviews, selecting the migrant population settlement community---T village as the researchobject, from14families of participating in photovoice project selected the8families in depthinterview, interview data after the subject classification and code analysis.In this paper, on the basis of family stress and coping theory, from the family in the process ofstress and coping, analysis the family resilience key process. Study found that rural-urbanmigrant family’s resilience mainly reflects in the family belief systems, family organizationalpatterns and family communication in three aspects. These three aspects are closely linked andinfluence each other. Family belief system is the core of the family resilience, is also thefoundation of family organizational patterns and family communication. The family organizationpattern also need through the communication and coordination to achieve. Therefore, the keyprocess of family resilience is a complex dynamic process of interaction.For migrant family, family belief system is the support during they were experience challengesand difficulties, and also is the powerful forces for overcoming adversity. Coming to the strangecity, the migrant families pursuit the future of better life, try very hard to earn money for theirfamily, became the family’s common goals and beliefs. Is critical to the interpretation of meaningin adversity, they think the current unfavorable situation is a must process, is also a family facingcommon challenges, only optimistic, positive attitude can help them get out of adversity.Family organization pattern provides the corresponding structure and function to support theoperation and adjustment when facing difficulties. It plays an important role in coping with stressand solving the problem effectively. Migrant family structure is basically the nuclear family,family internal division of labor is still the "male lord outside homemaking women" model. Butmany families because of operation of family business formed the equal cooperation partnershipbetween husband and wife. The family of power balance, helps to marital intimacy, stability andsatisfaction, is advantageous to the husband and wife in the face of difficulties together; alsohelps to promote partners grow together. At the same time, the family to deal with all kinds of pressure to adapt to the new environment, need strong organizer, can play a good stable morale,to grasp the direction and organizing a mob to force coagulation function. Usually the husbandacts as the leader of the family, is responsible for making important decisions, seeking socialresources, so as to lead the family out of the predicament and crisis. From links and cohesion ofthe family, these families because of the migration process common family goals and the crisisand challenge, more close to the relationship between each other, they can according to theadvantage of family members and the ability to take on family responsibilities, to allow thedifferences between individuals, mutual understanding and care, and enjoy family together.Meanwhile, they also need to mobilize social resources to relieve the pressure. Migrant familymost can get social resources and support, mainly from the relatives and friends of mutual aidnetwork and community resources, it also becomes an important support them withstandadversity.Family communication is the foundation of the family resilience. Migrant family incommunication style, emotional expression and way of resolving conflicts has its uniqueness.Their communication has the characteristics of practicality, inside collect, less oralcommunication, and for the common goal to earn money; they are easy to reach a tacitunderstanding. A remarkable on the parent-child communication, all the parents focus onchildren education and future, but because of the busy working, the content and frequency ofparent-child communication limited. In families with many children have unbalanced situation ofparent-child communication. And for emotional expression, they mostly used to implicit emotionexpression way, to show love and care in their daily actions. Flow on the way of solving familyconflict, family adopted mostly in the form of communication negotiation way, also have thedispute to reach a compromise or become the shrinking continuously. And resilient family isthrough communication and negotiation, cooperation to solve the family problem or crisis.The main contribution of this paper is: taking family stress and coping theory and familyresilience theory as the foundation, through empirical research to the rural-urban migrantfamilies, share family struggle in adversity of life story, interpret the key factors of familyresilience and the key process, explore the construction the family resilience theory in China.Changing the previous problem perspective to family resilience is also providing the newunderstanding of the migrant family.The research limitation is: family resilience factors analysis and functioning process analysis stilllack a certain depth, if can combine qualitative and quantitative research, the study of familyresilience will be more scientific and convincing. In addition, the classification on the basis ofcharacteristic analysis of the migrant family remains to be strengthened.