Family‐centered kindergarten social work services in Hong Kong: A pilot project

Social work services at schools in Hong Kong will begin a new chapter in kindergartens in 2018–2019 school year. Early childhood professionals have long considered family‐centered service delivery best practice. This paper reports a pioneer project on a family‐centered approach in kindergarten social work services in Hong Kong. The project was illustrated according to the following family‐centered principles: (a) The family as the unit of attention, (b) Linking families with community resources, (c) Flexible and individualized service provision, and (d) Creating partnerships and supportive relationships. The value and contributions of family‐centered social work services in kindergartens and implications for social work training in Hong Kong are discussed.     

From Transitional to Permanent Uncertainty: Employability of Middle‐aged Workers in Hong Kong

Since the 1990s, Hong Kong has experienced increasing economic uncertainty. Middle‐aged workers, who often have little formal education and limited skills, have been the first casualties of economic restructuring. Initially, their unemployment was considered transitional. Limited government‐sponsored retraining programs were expected to improve their employability. Subsequent economic crises, however, have undercut the hopes of both workers and policy‐makers. Despite improvements in the job market since the mid‐2000s, the belief that unemployment was transitional has been replaced by a permanent state of uncertainty and consequent anxiety. Flexibility is considered the key to sustaining economic growth, and would relieve the insecurity and anxiety associated with unemployment. Policies have been modified, but they are still based on a narrowly defined concept of individual employability, which consolidates the sense of uncertainty. To address the factors contributing to the perception of permanent uncertainty among middle‐aged workers, we advocate a pragmatic approach that takes reference from the notion of flexicurity to mitigate this sense of uncertainty.     

自助团体在香港发展的普遍性与价值性

作为一种重要的社会力量和满足人们需求的资源,自助团体的发展为香港的社会服务带来了新的活力。自助团体提供的服务在某些方面比专业领域提供的服务有效和廉价得多。除了对个人有所帮助外,它还能影响一些社会福利及医疗政策,使团体成员在宏观层面上获益。     

The role of perceived social reality in the adoption of postmaterial values: The case of Hong Kong

While much research in the past four decades has demonstrated a turn toward postmaterial values in many developed countries in the world, there are continual debates regarding the factors behind such cultural changes. This study examines the role of certain cognitive factors in the adoption of postmaterial value orientations. Analysis of three surveys conducted between 2012 and 2016 in Hong Kong illustrate that postmaterial values are, at the individual level, tied to criticisms against social inequality and immobility. The relationship is stronger among better educated people and people with higher levels of news exposure. The analysis contributes to the broader literature on cultural change in modern societies by suggesting that social affluence is not a sufficient condition for the rise of postmaterial values. Instead, specific combinations of social conditions and a process of cognitive mobilization could initiate a postmaterial turn.     

Restorative justice for delinquents in Hong Kong: current practices and challenges

ABSTRACT

In Hong Kong, juvenile justice embraces mainly disciplinary welfare and rehabilitative philosophies. Various statutory measures are applied to juvenile offenders, including police cautioning, community-based treatment programmes and custodial sentencing options. However, no statutory restorative measure has yet been incorporated into the mainstream criminal justice system in Hong Kong. Several non-governmental organisations are developing innovative strategies to prevent problematic adolescents from slipping into delinquency and are willing to apply restorative practices to help delinquents desist from engaging in criminal careers. This study begins with main features of restorative justice, and it highlights the preventive and correctional services for delinquents in Hong Kong. The study also questions the explanations offered by the government for not implementing restorative justice. By comparing restorative options for juveniles in some Asian jurisdictions, the study advocates for an earlier introduction of restorative justice for the benefits of juvenile offenders.     

Life Aspirations: Their Impact on Family and Work Conflict and Life Satisfaction in Hong Kong and Taiwan

Family and work conflict (F/WC) has gained prominence in developed economies in Asia as individuals are faced with the increased demands from work and families that are still considered very important. Hong Kong and Taiwan best illustrate the changing social and economic conditions that have given rise to this conflict. In these two societies, people have demonstrated a strong emphasis on work, even when it entails the sacrifice of family tasks and duties. An array of informal and formal services have been mobilized to allow people to fulfill their duties to work and family. Based on surveys conducted in Hong Kong and Taiwan in late 2009, this paper investigated F/WC and life satisfaction. Specifically, it examined changing life aspirations, both material and non‐material, as predictors of F/WC and life satisfaction. The surveys found that respondents had high aspirations for both their family and their work, and for both material and non‐material assets, and that they experienced high‐level F/WC. Based on the statistical analysis, we argue that minimizing the interference of family life on work and emphasizing non‐material life aspirations could promote better life satisfaction.     

Hong Kong: workfare in the world's freest economy

Chan CK. Hong Kong: workfare in the world's freest economy Int J Soc Welfare 2011: 20: 22–32 © 2009 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. Workfare was introduced in many countries to suppress welfare dependency and reduce social security expenditures. However, workfare was launched in Hong Kong when there was only a relatively small social security budget and its citizens still strongly adhered to the ideologies of self‐reliance. It was found that workfare has performed several functions in Hong Kong. First, by forcing unemployed claimants to give up benefits, Hong Kong has been able to save on social security expenditures. Second, workfare has combined with Hong Kong's semi‐democratic polity so that extremely stigmatising welfare measures have been implemented. Third, it has pushed poor citizens into the labour market without having any protection over wages and working hours. Thus, the combination of workfare and a semi‐democratic polity has successfully suppressed Hong Kong's welfare demands and strengthened its self‐help spirit. As a result, Hong Kong's minimal social security scheme and its low tax policy have been maintained.     

Issues and Challenges in Performing Family Impact Analysis – Implications for Hong Kong

Family impact analysis (FIA) is informed by a growing vision of incorporating a family perspective into policy making. It is a skillful and technical exercise in examining past, present, or probable future consequences – both intended and unintended – of a policy on family well‐being. Originating in the USA in the 1970s, it has become state/provincial or federal policy in the USA, Canada (Alberta), Australia, and Hong Kong. The policy has had different degrees of success in these countries. This article reviewed the critical issues and challenges for implementing the policy and the countries’ different responses to the challenges. It also discussed the implications of these international experiences on Hong Kong's policy of FIA as the newest member of the ranks. Attention to the diversity of families in defining family, adequate training and support to policy staff, building of quality control mechanisms, and the development of grassroots and political support of FIA were recommended. The review also found that there was a dearth of evaluation research on the policy. Further studies are necessary to examine whether FIA is an effective means of affecting policy‐planning decisions. It is a shared obligation of all countries that voted for a policy on FIA.     

The political activities of social workers in the context of changing roles and political transition in Hong Kong

The article reports on a fourth study on the political participation of social workers based on a methodology developed by Gray and Collett van Rooyen (2000). Thus far studies have been conducted in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The present study examined the political activities of social workers in Hong Kong. It begins with a review of the politicisation of Hong Kong's social workers, tracing developments from the 1960s onwards. It then examines the literature on political participation in social work, particularly various typologies of political activity, in order to add to theory relating to this important aspect of social-work practice. Thereafter, it outlines the conceptual framework and methodology used in the study, the results of which provide the basis for the discussion of the political activities of social workers in Hong Kong. It ends with an in-depth discussion of the implications of the findings for the political role of social workers in Hong Kong's changing political context.     

Programme Effectiveness in Activating Welfare Recipients to Work: The Case of Hong Kong

Some theories and research based on data in the West have implied the effectiveness of measures using the work-first approach, human capital development, community work experience, and financial incentives to promote welfare recipients’ transition from welfare to work. Nevertheless, the generality of the implication does not hold without examining the effectiveness in a non-Western setting. The present study thus employs survey data from 1,240 welfare recipients in Hong Kong to investigate the effectiveness of various measures for raising the recipients’ work motivation and diminishing their welfare dependency. The measures examined include the Intensive Employment Assistance Project (IEAP), Community Work (CW) Programme and Disregarded Earnings (DE) arrangements. Findings reveal the effectiveness of these three measures. Particularly, help received from various services of the IEAP was the principal factor in the effectiveness of the IEAP and the IEAP was effective for welfare recipients who were older or less skilled. The findings thus offer support to the generality of the claim about the effectiveness of welfare-to-work programmes.     

Improving primary level home and community care services for older people: The case of Hong Kong

The aims of this study were to assess the impairment levels of users and waitlisted applicants for Hong Kong's Integrated Home Care Services (Ordinary Cases) (IHCS [OC]), reveal their possible hidden needs and potential demand for higher level services, assess their unmet needs for IHCS (OC) and explore whether not using IHCS (OC) was associated with any deterioration in impairment. In all, 567 respondents were clinically assessed twice, over a 6‐month interval, by the Minimal Data Set Home Care questionnaire. The results showed that some moderately or severely impaired respondents had only limited access to higher level services. Some respondents with either no impairment or only low‐level impairment had applied for higher level services. Most waitlisted applicants had not received any IHCS (OC), even after 6 months of waiting. Using IHCS (OC) or not had no significant impact on the deterioration in impairment. Several ways of improving home and community care services are discussed.     

内地灾害救助的发展及与港、澳的比较思考

内地的灾害救助从灾害管理到灾害的统计、核定、评估,应急预案和响应,从生活救助到恢复重建,从资金物资储备到捐赠,已经形成了较具规模的主体框架,并在救灾实践中得到不断的完善和发展,当然也存在着一些局限。香港、澳门的灾害救助有着各自的特色,香港基金式管理方式和澳门部门联动与灾民中心,为内地灾害救助体系的发展提供了很多思考。     

Welfare Policies and the Construction of Welfare Relations in a Residual Welfare State: The Case of Hong Kong

Each welfare system has its own welfare relations for shaping and maintaining certain types of welfare practices and welfare ideologies. Welfare relations concern the distribution of welfare responsibilities among various social institutions, the public's welfare expectations and entitlements, and the status of welfare recipients. Welfare policies, which are a legal basis of the dominant class's philosophy as well as a mechanism for policing welfare recipients' use of benefits, play an important role in shaping and constructing the welfare relations of a country. This paper discusses how welfare policies construct the required welfare relations with regard to Hong Kong's social security system. It is argued that the persistence of Hong Kong's residual welfare model is partly based on the residual welfare relations which facilitate family-centred and market-oriented welfare practices.     

Popularity and Acceptance as Distinct Dimensions of Social Standing for Chinese Children in Hong Kong

This study attempted to validate distinctions between popularity and social acceptance in the cultural context of Hong Kong. We recruited 280 Chinese children (132 girls, 148 boys, mean age = 9.5) from Hong Kong primary schools. These children completed a peer nomination inventory assessing popularity, social acceptance, social rejection, aggression, peer victimization, and social behavior. Consistent with research conducted in western samples, we found that social acceptance was correlated primarily with positive behavioral characteristics (i.e., assertiveness‐leadership and low levels of submissiveness‐withdrawal). In contrast, popularity was associated with a more mixed pattern of features including high levels of aggression. The overall pattern of findings closely replicates past research conducted in North American and European settings.     

Expediting youth's entry into employment whilst overlooking precariousness: Flexi‐employability and disciplinary activation in Hong Kong

With an emphasis placed on supply‐side interventions such as skills training and incentives enhancement, active labor market polices (ALMPs) are strongly promoted by international organizations and widely adopted across different welfare regimes to boost employment rates. This article first presents the under‐examined relationship between ALMPs and employment precariousness, which has posed a challenge to the neoliberal notion of employability and activation. Youth‐focused employment policies tend to speed up employment entry whilst downplaying the risk of precariousness and the importance of job quality, and thus further reinforcing the belief that engaging in precarious employment is tolerable if not inevitable. The article then examines the case of Hong Kong, which illustrates that its relatively low rate of youth unemployment may conceal the unfavorable employment conditions confronted by youth. It is argued that the service‐led employment policies and short‐term vocational training define the employability of young workers in terms of labor flexibilities. The coined phase of “flexi‐employability” is characterized by promoting youth's readiness for, and adaptability to, the volatilities and changing demands of the labor market. Arguably, the disciplinary approach to youth activation would only strengthen the work‐first principle by enforcing young people to take up jobs available and leave welfare as soon as possible, but without thoroughly addressing the risks and insecurities generated by the labor market in undermining their well‐being.     

Welfare attitudes and social class: the case of Hong Kong in comparative perspective

Based on a survey of Hong Kong residents, this article explores the attitudes towards the welfare state and whether or not there are significant differences between different social classes with regard to their approval of the welfare state. The findings were then compared with those for Sweden and the USA. The study shows that Hong Kong residents strongly approve of the welfare state. The strength of their support is similar to that in Sweden and is far stronger than in the USA. In Hong Kong, the influence of social class on attitudes towards the welfare state is negligible. In some cases, the privileged classes expressed greater approval for the welfare state than the underprivileged classes. This is in striking contrast to the experiences in Sweden and the USA where the underprivileged classes are more supportive of the welfare state than are the privileged classes.     

The Public's Changing Perceptions of the Condition of Social Welfare in Hong Kong: Lessons for Social Development

In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, the Hong Kong government introduced welfare reforms to ease the pressure from fiscal challenges and swelling welfare rolls; at the same time, to maintain its development credentials, it made an effort to adhere to its colonial tradition on the provision of welfare. The government adopted various strategies to garner popular support for promoting economic development as the primary goal and for promoting social harmony under the concept of ‘helping people to help themselves’. This article examines Hong Kong people's changing perceptions of the condition of social welfare in the past decade. Using a multidimensional developmental welfare approach and data from two opinion surveys conducted in 1997 and 2008, the study finds that Hong Kong people expressed a relatively high level of satisfaction about their own lives, but varying degrees of reservation about the problem of poverty, government provision of social welfare, and opportunities for social mobility. As a result of the sectorally unbalanced welfare reforms, which are biased against the disadvantaged, some of these perceptions have become more negative in recent years. Socially vulnerable people, especially the lower classes, are now more critical of the condition of social welfare, and such feelings seem to be intensifying. It is thus suggested that special attention to the issue of class should be paid in social development programmes to ensure social equality and social justice.     

Poverty alleviation,coverage and fiscal sustainability: Investigating the effect of a new social pension in Hong Kong

This article synthesises the characteristics of social pensions across Asia and evaluates the effect of a new social pension in the Hong Kong SAR, the Old Age Living Allowance (OALA), on poverty alleviation, coverage rates and fiscal sustainability. We found that the effectiveness of the OALA in reducing old‐age poverty was limited, although it has led to an increase of retirement pension coverage by 6%. The OALA is projected to face substantial cost increases in the medium and longer term. Increasing the level of OALA benefits would be a direct means to enhance its poverty alleviation effect but may potentially be hampered by concerns about the fiscal sustainability of such changes. More obfuscated alternatives for Hong Kong policy makers to affect old‐age poverty alleviation include adjusting the indexing rules of benefit level payments and the eligibility criteria to reduce the stigma attached to the current policy choices.     

The impacts of housing factors on deprivation in a world city: The case of Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a typical example of a world city that faces escalating poverty and housing problems. Problems related to housing are crucial in determining deprivation. By means of hierarchical linear regression on a representative survey of Hong Kong residents in 2014, this study examines the impacts of household income and housing factors on the deprivation of residents in Hong Kong. The study indicates that income level has a crucial effect on the deprivation level of households; whereas housing cost per capita, living area per capita, and living quarter problems significantly influence deprivation. A small interacting effect exists between household income and housing factors, which do not influence the independent effects of living area per capita and living quarter problems on deprivation. For the public rental housing residents, only the effect of living quarter problem on deprivation is significant, whereas for private rental housing residents, living area per capita and living quarter problem have a significant effect. Among all the models, housing expense per capita is a significant factor only in model for overcrowded households. The study recommends that improving the maintenance and renovation schemes for public and private housing with poor living environment is a good strategy to improve housing conditions and deprivation. The study suggests that anti‐poverty policies must consider strategies and measures that can improve the housing factors, including housing expenses, living density and living quarter maintenance problems, especially for those residents with high living density, such as those living in bed spaces, cubicles, and subdivided flats.     

港台社会工作发展路径的比较分析

虽然港台社会工作的发展进程较为一致，但由于二者在历史背景、渊源及社会发展情况等方面存在差异，导致二者在发展路径上存在着“自上而下”与“自下而上”的分殊。大陆应注意两种路径的结合，发挥政府与社会工作界的各自优势，共同推进中国社会工作的进程。