Research On Developmental Characteristics And Its Influencing Factors To Social Adaptation Of "Floating Children"

The "flowing children" is one of the weak groups in the society, whose healthy growth has attracted broad attention of the whole society.The "floating children" mean those floating peasant workers' children coming to cities to receive the compulsory education. Since the reform and opening up policies, there are more and more peasants coming to work in cities from the countryside. The number of their children along with them also has been increasing. When entering cities, these "floating children" have come across many difficulties, especially the adaptation problem. However, through some relevant data analyses, we found that domestic research on this issue is quite weak, and so is the foreign study, some of its achievements can't be directly applied into practice in China. Therefore, in educational practice, it is an urgent problem to be solved that how to effectively carry out the education about improving the social adaptation of the "floating children" . This paper begins with the need of school education, targets on perfecting the theory of school psychological education and providing education with some references and guidances. The main research contents include creating a social adaptation scale, investigating the social adaptation of the "floating children" and analyzing the factors that influence their social adaptation. This research proceeds with the following procedures:First: Create a scale. The question items social adaptation scale of children's was collected by means of interviews and open questionnaire and selected and rectified by some psychologists and teachers from primary and middle schools. Then using methods of item and factor analyses, those question items were chosen to form the formal scale. We continued to apply the formal scale. into practice and made Exploratory Factor Analysis so as to set up a structure model of the scale. and examined its validity by Confirmatory Factor Analysis(CFA).Second: exploring the characteristics. investigating the floating children and urban children by the Social Adaptation Scale for Children and Adolescents, the result was processed and analyzed by SPSS for Windows 12.0.Third: Analyze the factors influencing the social adaptation of the "floating children". For this purpose, we've created a special questionnaire in which the items came from structureless interviews and the past research achievements. After selection, we left 20 question items and found they could be well explained by four factors through factor analyses. They were named school factor,family factor,social pressure and individual ambition. Combining this questionnaire with the social adaptation scale, we edited them and applied them into practice. Using AMOS4.0 software, we estimated the fitting index of these competition models and chose the best one as the influencing model of social adaptation of the "floating children".The following basic conclusions are made from this research.1 The structure of children's social adaptation contains eight first-order factors—having good relationship with others,participating activities,studying with self-determination,living independently,satisfying with the environment,getting identified by the society,having a harmonious relationship with others,having social enthusiasm and three second-order factors—adaptation between social relation and their ideas, study and school, life and activity. After being tested, this social adaptation scale for children's adaptation was of high degree of reliability and it was suitable for measuring the adaptation of the "floating children".2 The level of floating children's social adaptation is generally lower than that of urban children, but the "floating children" are more independent in life. There are many factors influencing the social adaptation of the "floating children", such as:1) Gender, girls' social adaptation tends to be much better than boys.2) Grade, the degree of children's social adaptation tends to increase with their grade getting higher.3) Frequency of changing schools, the more often the children change schools, the more discontented they will become. Among the "floating children", those with having siblings are more independent in their lives than those who are the only child in their families.4) Family atmosphere, the more harmonious their families are, the higher level of social adaptation the children will have.5) Degree of teacher's democracy, the higher degree of teacher's democracy is, the better social adaptation the children will have. 6) Parents' control, proper control from parents can beat help children to adapt to the society, while too little control will bring the worst influence on children's social adaptation.7) Language familiarity, the more the "floating children" are familiar with the local language, the higher degree of social adaptation they will have.3. there are four main factors influencing the social adaptation of "floating children", they are individual ambitiom school factor,social pressure and family factor. School factor and individual ambition have direct influence on social adaptation; family factor and social pressure give indirect influence on social adaptation and individual ambition; family factor also affects social adaptation indirectly through social pressure and school factor; and school factor can indirectly affect social adaptation through individual ambition as well.In a word, children's social adaptation is made up of eight first-order factors and three second-order factors. The general level of floating children's social adaptation is relatively lower and different sub-groups of these children have different degree of social adaptation. The four main factors that influence social adaptation of "floating children" are individual family,school and society, all of which impact influence on social adaptation of the "the floating children" in different means and aspects.