Chinese Christian immigrants negotiating abortion issue: Interface between societal positionality, religiosity, and moral reasoning

This dissertation examines the variety of abortion opinion and reasoning among first-generation Chinese immigrant women with Protestant Christian affiliation. It aims to use the abortion issue to illustrate the interactive and interpretive nature of moral reasoning, and to identify its specific relations and meanings to the Chinese Christian immigrant sample.; Societal influence refers to immigrant's original culture/society and acculturative orientation, and her evolving perceptions about these positions. Differentiated between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity, religious factor refers to the living faith as well as the social meaning system with communal activities.; A mixed-method design combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches was adopted to study the interface between societal positionality, religiosity, and moral reasoning on the levels of microgenetic, ontogenetic, and phelogenetic histories. Thirty-one participants discussed their opinions and reasoning about abortion, and their acculturative orientation through individual interviews, and completed the questionnaires about their intrinsic religiosity, religious activities, and demographic background. Half of the sample came from the mainland China and half from other Chinese populated areas or countries. Eight participated in a second interview on life history and faith development.; Quantitative analysis compared opinions on abortion in various dilemma contexts, and examined the effects of intrinsic religiosity, original area, and acculturative orientation on the abortion opinions. Qualitative analysis identified the arguing dynamics underlying the abortion negotiation, and reconstructed the thematic field in life history. Findings from both approaches were combined for complementary analysis.; Opinions and justification on abortion reflect ambiguity, complexity, and inconsistency between individuals as well as within individual, without necessary agreements on the informational assumptions. Abortion negotiation is connected to the characteristics in spirituality, original culture/society, and acculturative orientation.; Religiosity, especially intrinsic religiosity, contributes to the moral standard and the consistency in opinions across dilemma contexts. Societal positionality contributes to the situational dependency and the perception of difficulties in real-life. Participants vary in their moral thinking depending on where they have been contextually and what they have experienced relationally in the societal and spiritual histories.