Children Of Immigration: Educationa Choices After Junior High School In The Perspective Of Family Household Social Capital

Based on four cases of migrant children in Shanghai, I explore the process that how the migrant families and children make choices after children graduate from middle school without qualification for continuing high school education by the theoretic frame of family social capital, in order to know the different influences of national institutions and policies on those families and understand why some children have better future and others do not. The first section as an introduction includes my academic consciousness and research method; the second section identifies my adopted theory and analytical framework through reviewing others research and analyzing my research context. In the third and fourth section, I describe the four families' process of making decisions between "Return" and "stay" respectively, through which we can see the role of family social capital on different results; the final section discusses the findings and weaknesses of this research from both macro and micro level. My findings are, first, family social capital has significant impact on growth and development of youth, especially on the migrant children who are lack of institutional and systematic support. The extent of their family social capital decide if they could adapt to the crisis and find better opportunities and future; second, the family social capital is dynamic that responding to the changes of inner and external environment, so we can not ignore to innovate the macro system. Thirdly, compared with economic capital, social capital has more influence on the process of the choosing, which can make the transformation of the economic capital into other resources for children's education. However, this paper does not examine the cultural tradition and the structural power behind the family social capital, which invites future research and discussion.