Subethnic interpersonal dynamic in diasporic community: a study on Chinese immigrants in Vancouver

ABSTRACT

Ethnicity is a social construct that can be conceptualised as a social classification delineating certain boundaries between an ethnic group and the dominant group. Members of an ethnic group are assumed to share similar cultural characteristics and to be homogenous among themselves. Many studies in ethnic organisations have indicated that subethnicity also exists within an ethnic group, but research on subethnicity is scant. Based on the findings of an exploratory study conducted in Vancouver, Canada, we examined how, at an interpersonal level, place of origin, language, mutual bias and discrimination and transnational politics divide the Chinese diasporic community subethnically. Meanwhile, being Chinese in the Canadian context and willingness to break the subethnic boundaries are noted as counterforces to the subethnic divide. We contend that interpersonal interaction is an imperative dimension for the understanding of the shaping of boundary between different subethnic groups.     

Transnationalism over the Life Course

The sociological research on transnational migration has blossomed over the past decade to become one of the most discussed ideas in the sociology of immigration and the discipline more generally. In this review, we draw attention to transnationalism research that includes elements of the life course perspective. We distinguish two ways that the life course approach can be integrated with research on transnationalism: Research that examines the unique transnational aspects of a single life stage, and research that considers transnational trajectories and transitions as individuals move through two or more life stages. We propose that more explicit attention to the life course in transnational research will lead to interesting and enlightening new research directions.     

Estimation Under the Lehmann Regression Model with Interval-Censored Data

We consider the estimation problem under the Lehmann model with interval-censored data, but focus on the computational issues. There are two methods for computing the semi-parametric maximum likelihood estimator (SMLE) under the Lehmann model (or called Cox model): the Newton-Raphson (NR) method and the profile likelihood (PL) method. We show that they often do not get close to the SMLE. We propose several approach to overcome the computational difficulty and apply our method to a breast cancer research data set.     

Integrated services in Australian early childhood education and care: what can we learn from our past?

Recent Australian interest in the integration of early childhood services is largely informed by international research and policy developments, particularly from the United Kingdom. Service integration is widely recognised as an effective means of holistically meeting the needs of children and families and ameliorating disadvantage. What is less well known is that Australia has a history of integrated early childhood services. This paper focuses on three points in 20th century Australia when advocacy for integrated early childhood service provision was evident: post‐World War I when the first Mother and Baby Welfare Clinic was established; during the late 1930s to mid 1940s with the advent of the Lady Gowrie Centres; and in the 1970s when several reports recommended the integration and co‐ordination of early years services. Attending to this history acknowledges this innovative Australian work, and provides potentially valuable, and somewhat cautionary, lessons for contemporary advocacy for integrated early childhood services.     

Perfect aggregation of Bayesian analysis on compositional data

Sufficiency is a widely used concept for reducing the dimensionality of a data set. Collecting data for a sufficient statistic is generally much easier and less expensive than collecting all of the available data. When the posterior distributions of a quantity of interest given the aggregate and disaggregate data are identical, perfect aggregation is said to hold, and in this case the aggregate data is a sufficient statistic for the quantity of interest. In this paper, the conditions for perfect aggregation are shown to depend on the functional form of the prior distribution. When the quantity of interest is the sum of some parameters in a vector having either a generalized Dirichlet or a Liouville distribution for analyzing compositional data, necessary and sufficient conditions for perfect aggregation are also established.     

On a mixture vector autoregressive model

The authors show how to extend univariate mixture autoregressive models to a multivariate time series context. Similar to the univariate case, the multivariate model consists of a mixture of stationary or nonstationary autoregressive components. The authors give the first and second order stationarity conditions for a multivariate case up to order 2. They also derive the second order stationarity condition for the univariate mixture model up to arbitrary order. They describe an EM algorithm for estimation, as well as a diagnostic checking procedure. They study the performance of their method via simulations and include a real application.     

刘向《诗》学家法研究

刘向之《诗经》学家法,前人每有论及。然其论据及研究方法,均仍有可改善之处。本文从家学、异文比较、《诗》说比较三方面,考论刘向之《诗》学家法,以图全面分析刘向《诗》学家法的问题,并希望由此而于两汉《诗》学研究有所裨益。     

20世纪文学理论:中国与西方

20世纪西方的文学理论,名目繁多,都先后输入中国,从世纪初即如此。中叶以后,文论的西潮更汹涌流入两岸三地,众多中华的文学研究者崇洋趋新,以西方的马首是瞻。20世纪西方文论内容丰富,有助于文学析评,却也有艰深或欠通达的不足。中华学者从这些文论中有所得益,却也有不分青红皂白照单全收而贻笑大方的。至于西方汉学家研究中国文论虽见成果,但难免有偏差;一般学术界、文化界对中国文论则只作极有限的"接受",甚至完全忽视。20世纪的文学理论,中国多入而几乎没有出,出现严重的文化赤字。本文作者建议中华学者从比较文学的角度,对中国古代文论重新诠释,并斟酌应用于实际批评,然后考虑向西方输出。作者认为可以《文心雕龙》为基础,建构一个中西合璧的文论体系,让雕龙成为飞龙。     

Does The Legalization of Undocumented Immigrants in the US Encourage Unauthorized Immigration from Mexico? An Empirical Analysis of the Moral Hazard of Legalization

Does the prospect of a legalization programme in the US increase unauthorized immigration from Mexico? The logic of the moral hazard of legalization suggests that providing lawful status to undocumented immigrants has the unintended effect of incentivizing further unauthorized immigration. However, we argue and show that concerns about the moral hazard of legalization may be overstated. We conceptualize our argument using two distinct temporal dimensions: a concurrent dimension and a prospective one. Our analysis of the 2007 Mexican Migration Field Research Program (MMFRP) survey provides evidence supporting our arguments. The data show that knowledge regarding a prospective legalization programme in the US does not increase the intent to migrate among prospective migrants. Our results hold when accounting for a range of potential confounding factors, across several multivariate model specifications, and also when analysing comparable respondents who are matched using propensity score matching (PSM) techniques.     

“I Wish to be Self-Reliant”: Aspiration for Self-Reliance,Need and Life Satisfaction,and Exit Dilemma of Welfare Recipients in Hong Kong

This qualitative study explores the welfare recipients’ experiences of and attitudes toward the welfare benefit system in Hong Kong. A sample of 19 welfare recipients from six main recipient groups was interviewed, some twice. This study finds that the recipients have strong aspirations to exit the welfare benefit system. The welfare application process is painful; they are strongly stigmatized; they do not have sufficient resources to meet many of their expected needs; and, after all, they have strong ethos for self-reliance. However, they remain in the benefit system. This study looks into this paradox and the challenges facing the welfare benefit system in Hong Kong in terms of providing ontological security on the one hand and promoting self-reliance on the other.