A Comparative Study On Chinese And American Young Christians’ Filial Piety

Chinese culture is a culture of filial piety. Filial piety, as a value and a paramountethic endorsed and exercised by Chinese people for centuries, haattention in China. Nowadays research on family or parent-child relationship in theWest has also paid attention to filial piety, in order to address the issue of caring forthe elderly outside the government welfare.The present research uses one of the Ten Commandments in the Bible "Honor thyfather and mother" as the entry point, and tries to investigate the followingquestions: Hthose of their behaviors in honoring parents different from their attitudes? What is the differencebetween traditional filial piety and modern filial piety?The present research adopts quantitative research methodology, modifies andtranslates Yang K-to mfilial piety. It separatesand according to the four factors (Respecting parents, Sacrificing oneself to obeyparents, Supporting/commemorating parents, and Protecting/glorifying parents) inthe scale, investigates filial attitudes and behaviors in each factor.The author collected84valid questionnaires, and after analyzing the data throughSPSS, determined that while Chinese Christians score higher than their Americancounterparts in filial attitudes, there is no significant difference between the twogroups in filial behavior. Both Chinese and American Christians score lower in filialbehavior than attitudes. The difference between attitudes and behavior in bothgroups reached a significant level. Chinese and American Christians alike scored lowest in both attitudes and behaviors in the section titled Sacrificing oneself toobey parents is o it isbasis.The study of filial piety in Chinese societies is mainly dominated by historians,philologists, and philosophers. Research from sociology is usually indigenous, sothe innovation of this study is that it melded literature from other disciplines, such asclassical literature study, sociology and gerontology, expounded the etic nature ofthe construct filial piety, and to study this topic from an intercultural perspective.In the end of the thesis, directions for future research are proposed for furtherresearch on cultural specific filial attitudes and behaviors. Changes of filial piety inthe process of cognition development and shift of filial piety from traditional tomodern are also important topics worth exploring.