Perceptions Of Family-Related Value Among Shanghai College Students: Comparisons And Developments

Family is an very important social institution, and"the ways that societal institutions (e.g., the family, education, economic, political, religious systems) function, their goals and their modes of operation express cultural value priorities (Schwartz, 1999)". Literature abounds on the studies of Chinese values from the perspective of cross-cultural psychology, which takes Chinese culture as a whole and compares Chinese values with other cultural values with few details about the specific values. Indigenous psychologies from Taiwan and Hong Kong have done a lot of work on unique and traditional Chinese values, among which"filial piety"is especially studied as an important value; however, the research subjects are mostly Chinese outside the China Mainland, and longitudinal studies of values change and studies of modern Chinese values are rare.This paper addressed the needs to understand modern Chinese family-related values in a constantly changing society."Objective reality may exist but that humans can never'know'reality; rather, they have perceptions of reality (Singer, 1987)", so in this study, we acknowledge that it may be nearly impossible to get accurate values samples, but we can investigate the perceptions that a given population has of their values. One hundred and seventy-eight Shanghai college students from 10 public institutions responded to a questionnaire on their understanding of Chinese family values, their perceptions of American family values and their acceptance of American value perceptions. The family-related values studied in this thesis include: hierarchy between parents and children, intimacy between parents and children, parents'expectation of obedient children, submissiveness of children, parents'expectation of being taken care of in old age, children's sense of duty towards care for elderly parents, children's independence upon the age of 18, the priority on honoring family name or on self achievement, importance of parents and children relationship vs. husband and wife relationship, preference of marriage stability vs. romantic love, husband and wife's economic and household responsibility, decision-making power between husband and wife, and priority of family vs. other matters.Then questions on mass media were asked to identify the most influential media in changing their values. This study found that compared with what was considered to be"traditional Chinese family values"the respondents believe that the parents/children relationship and the husband/wife relationship should be more equal, children should be more independent of parents in terms of economy and independent-thinking, and they approve of the American family values in their mind to a very large extent. However, regarding the core value of"filial piety", care for aged parents will not change very much according to the respondents. The study also found that domestic Chinese media has the largest influence on the respondents, and American sitcoms and Hollywood movies are more influential compared with text media.With an attempt to combine the emic local findings with overseas etic literature, this study compared the results to the studies of Hofstede and Schwartz. Studies on cultural-level values by Schwartz and work-related values by Hofstede shed much light on our insight into intercultural values comparisons. Through comparison with Hofstede's four dichotomies and the circular structure of cultural-level values, it is found that similar conclusions were drawn from this study.