Attributional Style In The Social Integration Of Migrant Children And Their Process And Coping

Social integration is an inevitable problem that migrant children have to face after the movement from rural to urban. As significant difference exists between China's urban and rural areas, migrant children are experiencing entirely different environment after they come to the city. Meanwhile, migrant children is also in the key period of physical and mental development. Therefore, whether migrant children can integrate into city life, good interaction with the surrounding environment is directly related to the flow of physical and mental development of children. Attributional style as a personality reflects the movement of children's cognitive appraisal of the external environment, based on cognitive-behavior link, the mobile children's attributional style may influence their response to the outside world, particularly in the social integration process within the inevitable culture shock, the flow of how children's attributional style in frustration contexts affect the behavior is what this research focused on.This research contained two parts. In the first part, depth interviews and questionnaires were conducted through Shanghai,Guangzhou, Wuhan and Jinan four cities, totally 1144 migrant children and 703 urban children are involved, to investigate social integration of migrant children and the impact done by their attributional style. On this basis, the second part of the study conducted an experiment in which 12 migrant children with either positive or negative attribution style were tested to find out how different attributional style affected migrant children's response of frustration during their social integration.From these two studies we found that:(1) Study of social integration:the social integration of migrant children includes three components:economic integration, social integration and psychological integration; These three factors affected each other and would mutually benefit each other.(2) Study of the impact that attributional style on social inclusion:Migrant Children showed self-service attribution style on the locus of control and stability dimensions, that was internal control, a stable place when facing a positive event and outside control and non-stable place facing a negative event. Such self-service attributional style did positive effect on the psychological integration of migrant children.(3) Experimental study of the impact that attributional style on frustration response during social integration:the migrant children holding positive attributional style reflected better than those with negative attributional style in situations of frustration; when enhancing positive attributional way on negative attribution style holding children, improvement was relatively showed.