The Characteristics Of Floating Children’s Social Integration And The Impact Of Family Environment

Since the economic reform and opening-up policy, China’s economy has been changing from planning economy to market economy. With the progress of this transition, China’s economy is developing quickly, and the urbanization process is accelerating, with more and more people from rural area rushing into cities to find work opportunities and pursue a better material and spiritual life. According to a survey on the floating people in 2013, there are 0.245 billion floating people in China, accounting to one sixth of the total population. Meanwhile, a trend of long term migration and moving with family has appeared. Many children are also floating to cities with their parents due to the lack of caring, becoming the so called “floating children”. The report issued by National Women Association in 213 demonstrates that there are 35.81 million floating children aged between 0-17 in 2010 in China, where 80.35% of them are holding a rural hukou, meaning that the total number of floating children from rural area is 28.77 million. The floating children, who move from countryside or small cities to big cities with their parents, not only need to go through the normal development period, but also need to deal with the adaptation issues caused by the significant change of living environment. Whether or not integrated to the new environment has great impact on the floating children’s physical and psychological development as well as the social harmony. The social integration of floating children has become a vital problem in the process of development of China.This research, based on the extant literature on migration, floating people and floating children in Psychology and Social Science, studied several aspects of floating children’s social integration including the definition, measurement dimensions, status quo and the impact of family environment using both qualitative and quantitative research methods. First, we interviewed 20 floating children, 10 parents and 4 teachers and proposed a new definition for floating children social integration as well as its measurement dimensions. Then, a survey questionnaire for floating children’s social integration was designed. Through stratified sampling method, we selected 200 floating children to pretest the questionnaire, based on which a revision was done. After that, 532 floating children were selected from primary school and junior high school to do the survey formally. Using the collected samples, the reliability and validity of the questionnaire were tested and the status quo, the impact of family environment as well as its mechanism were analyzed. The main conclusions are as follows:(1) Through a comprehensive literature review and interview, a new definition for floating children social integration was proposed: Floating children’s social integration is a process in which the floating children and the local resident individuals, groups accept, adapt and permeate with each other on social cultural life so as to reduce the gap between floating children and local children and integrate in an ultimate common social cultural life. There are four dimensions of floating children social integration: cultural integration, interactive integration, identificational and psychological integration.(2) A survey questionnaire was developed based on the qualitative study. After pretesting, piloting and the formal survey, the reliability and validity of the questionnaire are tested so that it can be used in other research related to floating children’s social integration.(3) The status quo of floating children’s social integration in China: floating children’s social integration is imbalanced among different dimensions. The integrations in culture and interact are better compared with the integration in identificational and psychological aspect. On identification, the proportion of the children of acculturation and integration type is small while the proportion of separation and marginalization is big. The floating children’s social integration is different with respect to different genders, birth places, family structures, family incomes and parents’ educations. The social integration of floating children under different parenting styles is different.(4) The characteristics of floating children’s family environment: The intimacy and adaptive of family environment are significantly different with respect to the family income and parents’ education. Floating children in different family environment have different integration degrees: the children in balanced family environment are integrated best, then the children in middle type family environment, and the last is the children in extreme family environment.(5)The parenting styles are significantly different with respect to gender, family structure, family income and parents’ education. Also, the resilience of floating children is significantly different on gender, family structure and parents’ education.(6)The intimacy and adaptive of family environment can significantly predict floating children’s social integration. The refusal and overprotection of mother’s parenting can negatively predict floating children’s social integration, while the warmth can predict it positively. Also, the resilience can positively predict floating children’s social integration.(7) The intimacy in family environment can not only impact floating children’s social integration directly, but also impact it through refusal, warmth and overprotection indirectly. Similarly, the adaptive in family environment can both impact floating children’s social integration directly and indirectly via refusal and warmth in parenting style.(8) Floating children’s psychological resilience, as a moderate variable, can impact both the direct path from family environment to social integration and the mediation path from family environment to social integration via parenting style. When resilience is low, the impact of intimacy and adaptive on social integration is low, while the negative impact of refusal and overprotection and the positive impact of warmth get smaller. When resilience is high, the impact of intimacy and adaptive is also high, the negative impact of refusal disappears, the negative impact of overprotection becomes smaller and the positive impact of warmth gets bigger.