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.     

Robustness properties of minimally‐supported Bayesian D‐optimal designs for heteroscedastic models

Bayesian D‐optimal designs supported on a fixed number of points were found by Dette & Wong (1998) for estimating parameters in a polynomial model when the error variance depends exponentially on the explanatory variable. The present authors provide optimal designs under a broader class of error variance structures and investigate the robustness properties of these designs to model and prior distribution assumptions. A comparison of the performance of the optimal designs relative to the popular uniform designs is also given. The authors' results suggest that Bayesian D‐optimal designs suported on a fixed number of points are more likely to be globaly optimal among all designs if the prior distribution is symmetric and is concentrated around its mean.     

Measuring Gay Populations and Antigay Hate Crime

Objectives . The study of crime directed at gay and lesbian targets is hampered by two measurement problems: Police agencies provide unreliable data on hate crime, and tract-level census data contain no direct information about gay or lesbian population density. This article attempts to gauge two quantities that cannot be measured directly or unambiguously: the size of the gay and lesbian populations and the number of hate crimes directed at gay and lesbian targets. Methods . Population data for New York City were gathered from market research lists and from a special tabulation of the 1990 Census. Hate crime data were obtained from the Anti-Violence Project and the New York Police Department. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the reliability of each measure and the correlation between latent population density and hate crime. Results . Each of these measures offers a reliable means by which to assess cross-sectional differences in the population density and victimization of gay men. Census and police data prove to be inferior indicators of lesbian population density and antilesbian hate crime. For both men and women, population density is strongly correlated with the incidence of hate crime. Conclusions . Despite the fact that advocacy groups record many more antigay incidents than do the police, both sources of data are in agreement about where hate crimes occur. The strong correlation between population density and hate crime against gay men implies that Census data could be used to forecast the occurrence of hate crime in areas where no police records exist.     

Co-constructing the Personal Space-Time Totality: Listening to the Dialogue of Vygotsky, Lewin, Bronfenbrenner, and Stern

Insightful ideals on the subtle and dynamic relation between the person and the environment have been expressed by Vygotsky, Lewin, Bronfenbrenner and Stern. Carefully following their intricate dialogue reveals that their ideas are mutually enriching. The present essay aims to revitalize this intricate dialogue, and to show how it converges to supply rich meaning to the concept of personal space-time totality. With a view to an empirical study of the personal space-time totality, a four-phase inquiry is proposed, which is essentially a refined co-construction between the subject and the researcher. It is suggested that such a co-construction can be meaningfully integrated into research areas such as autobiographical and narrative studies, commonsense psychology, and optimal human development.     

Moment matrices in conditional heteroskedastic models under elliptical distributions with applications in AR-ARCH models

It is well known that moment matrices play a very important rôle in econometrics and statistics. Liu and Heyde (Stat Pap 49:455–469, 2008) give exact expressions for two-moment matrices, including the Hessian for ARCH models under elliptical distributions. In this paper, we extend the theory by establishing two additional moment matrices for conditional heteroskedastic models under elliptical distributions. The moment matrices established in this paper implement the maximum likelihood estimation by some estimation algorithms like the scoring method. We illustrate the applicability of the additional moment matrices established in this paper by applying them to establish an AR-ARCH model under an elliptical distribution.     

The Volunteer Satisfaction Index: A Validation Study in the Chinese Cultural Context

Using a Hong Kong-sourced sample of 261 participants, this study set out to validate the Volunteer Satisfaction Index (VSI) in the Chinese cultural context and to evaluate its psychometric properties. The VSI was originally developed by Galindo-Kuhn and Guzley (2001) to measure the outcomes of volunteer experiences. In this study, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) yielded a different factor structure from that proposed by the scale developer. The three factors found were personal gain, relationship within organization and relationship with peers. Cronbach’s alpha values were high for all three subscales. Results from correlation and regression analysis also confirmed the construct and criterion-related validity of the scale. Thus, the reliability and validity of the scale were confirmed. Implications for the assessment of volunteer satisfaction and further directions for cross-cultural studies on related topics are discussed.     

Administrative Buy-in for User Participation in Managing Social Services

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a study conducted in Hong Kong on the value position of the social service providers regarding user participation in service management. Using a survey instrument to collect data from 642 service providers in an elderly service organization, the study explored whether or not the value position had an effect on the views of the service providers on the structural set-up for user participation, and whether the value position of the professional staff was significantly different from that of the non-professional staff. Exploratory factor analyses (EFA), confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) were applied in the analysis. The findings identify that administrative buy-in needed to support shared decision-making with the welfare service users has not been achieved in the studied organization, owing to the absence of value commitment to the user participation cause. As the professional staff was more supportive of values favoring user participation, the paper calls for an acculturation process that would be stimulated and led by professionals to develop a participatory culture. The paper also recommends conducting similar study on a larger scale and qualitative inquiry into factors influencing the formation of values about user participation in future research.     

Historical trajectories and lost heritage of early Chinese schools in Singapore – case study of Yeung Ching School in ‘Chinatown’

ABSTRACT

The history of modern Chinese schools in Singapore may be traced back to the early 20th century, when efforts to provide vernacular education in the British colony were made by community leaders across Chinese dialect groups, with support of the Qing Empire. Only a handful of these were selected as elite schools for bilingual education under the Special Assistance Plan (SAP) introduced in 1979 in independent Singapore. This paper examines the historical trajectories of these early schools from early association with Chinese nationalism to becoming multi-ethnic schools or simply defunct. It will focus on the case of the former Yeung Ching School in ‘Chinatown’ catering to the Cantonese community, to explore how the legacy of a Chinese school may be impacted by state formation and urban development since the 1950s, and also to point out a gap in current heritagisation pertaining to the role of education in shaping cultural identities.     

Emotion understanding and maternal sensitivity as protective factors against hostile attribution bias in anger‐prone children

The present research examined children’s anger proneness, emotion understanding, and maternal sensitivity during toddlerhood as predictors of children’s hostile attribution bias (HAB) during the later preschool years. At 2.8 years (N = 128), maternal sensitivity (e.g., child‐centered behavior) was observed during mother–child play and snack, and parents reported on children’s anger proneness. At 3.3 years, emotion understanding (i.e., ability to identify emotional expressions accurately) was measured via an interactive puppet interview. At 4.8 and 5.4 years, children's HAB was assessed via child responses to hypothetical vignettes of ambiguous peer provocations. Path models revealed that maternal sensitivity predicted fewer hostile attributions. In addition, emotion understanding and maternal sensitivity emerged as buffers against the negative effect of anger proneness on HAB. Specifically, greater anger proneness was associated with more frequent hostile attributions, but only when children had lower emotion understanding or had mothers who were less sensitive. The findings highlight the interplay between intrapersonal and interpersonal factors in early childhood that contribute to a hostile attribution bias during the preschool period.     

Assessing the Impact of Population Dynamics on Poverty Measures: A Decomposition Analysis

Social Indicators Research - Reducing income inequality is one of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals recently announced by United Nations. A relative poverty concept adopted by...