abstract: Parenting approaches that are firm yet warm (i.e., authoritative parenting) have been found to be robustly beneficial for mainstream White Americans youths, but do not demonstrate similarly consistent effects among Chinese Americans (CA) adolescents. Evidence suggests that CA adolescents interpret and experience parenting differently than their mainstream counterparts given differences in parenting values and child-rearing norms between traditional Chinese and mainstream American cultures. The current study tests the theory that prospective effects of parenting on psychological and academic functioning depends on adolescents' cultural frameworks for interpreting and understanding parenting. CA adolescents with values and expectations of parenting that are more consistent with mainstream American parenting norms were predicted to experience parenting similar to their White American counterparts (i.e., benefiting from a combination of parental strictness and warmth). In contrast, CA adolescents with parenting values and expectations more consistent with traditional Chinese parenting norms were predicted to experience parenting and its effects on academic and psychological outcomes differently than patterns documented in the mainstream literature. This study was conducted with a sample of Chinese American 9th graders (N = 500) from the Multicultural Family Adolescent Study. Latent Class Analysis (LCA), a person-centered approach to modeling CA adolescents' cultural frameworks for interpreting parenting, was employed using a combination of demographic variables (e.g., nativity, language use at home, mother's length of stay in the U.S.) and measures of parenting values and expectations (e.g., parental respect, ideal strictness & laxness). The study then examined whether prospective effects of parenting behaviors (strict control, warmth, and their interaction effect) on adolescent adjustment (internalizing and externalizing symptoms, substance use, and GPA) were moderated by latent class membership. The optimal LCA solution identified five distinct cultural frameworks for understanding parenting. Findings generally supported the idea that effects of parenting on CA adolescent adjustment depend on adolescents' cultural framework for parenting. The classic authoritative parenting effect (high strictness and warmth leads to positive outcomes) was found for the two most acculturated groups of adolescents. However, only one of these groups overtly endorsed mainstream American parenting values. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Psychology 2011

xv, 97 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Emotion experiences such as internalized distress have been described mostly in European Americans and adults in the psychological literature and less in Asian American children. Associations between emotion experience and expressivity have been established mostly through samples of European American children. Finally, the functionality of emotion experience and expressivity across cultural norms has not been examined thoroughly, especially in ethnic minority or bicultural children. This is of concern given that cultural ideals for emotion differ across cultural groups. This dissertation incorporates a cultural perspective to understanding the emotion experience while also relying on the functionalist approach as an organizing framework to understand expressivity in children from an Asian background. This study examined 70 Chinese American and 71 European American mothers and their 5 to 7 year old children. Mother and child reports of children's internalized V experience were obtained. Observers also rated children's expressivity in a frustration- eliciting task, alone and in the presence of their mothers. The first objective of the dissertation was to characterize the emotion experiences of Chinese American and European American young children, in particular, internalized distress. The second objective of this dissertation sought to observe children's expressivity in response to a frustrating situation, with and without their mothers. As a whole, Chinese American children experienced greater internalized distress than European American children based on mother and child reports. Contrary to hypotheses, Chinese American children were just as expressive as European American children during the frustration eliciting task, especially when mothers were present in the room. Furthermore, it appeared that European American children with greater child-reported anxiety and mother-reported depression showed less increase in their expressivity than all the other children when their mothers entered into the room. This study explored the role of culture in the socialization of emotion and the functionality of expressivity in solitary and social situations. Overall, this dissertation suggests that cultural, situational, and internal emotion experience are factors which concurrently play a role in children's emotion expressivity. / Adviser: Jeffrey Measelle

Applying a historical approach which contextualizes ethnic and gender perspectives, this thesis investigates the obstacles that second-generation Chinese American women encountered as they moved into the public sphere. This included sexual restraints at home and racial harassment outside. This study examines, as well, the opportunities that stimulated these women to break from their confinements. Anna May Wong and Hazel Ying Lee will serve as two role models among this second generation of women who successfully combined their cultural heritage with their education in the U.S. Their contributions inspired a whole generation of young bi-cultural women of their time. I will argue that, although the second generation had gone through cultural acculturation and resistance toward American mainstream culture, they constructed their new Chinese American identity during World War II through a synthesis of their contribution to the gender relations and ethnic identification in nationalist project.

abstract: Believe It! is an animated interactive computer program that delivers cognitive restructuring to adolescent females' irrational career beliefs. It challenges the irrational belief and offers more reasonable alternatives. The current study investigated the potentially differential effects of Asian versus Caucasian animated agents in delivering the treatment to young Chinese American women. The results suggested that the Asian animated agent was not significantly superior to the Caucasian animated agent. Nor was there a significant interaction between level of acculturation and the effects of the animated agents. Ways to modify the Believe It! program for Chinese American users were recommended. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.C. Counseling 2013

O presente trabalho focaliza os processos de formação da identidade, observados em narrativas da escritora sino-americana Maxine Hong Kingston. Documentando as contradições e a fragmentação do sujeito, procura-se iluminar os vários sentidos de subjetividade presentes em uma pessoa de origem chinesa que vive nos Estados Unidos na época da pós-modernidade. O quadro teórico utilizado na análise desses processos é construído a partir da crítica sobre o romance pósmoderno e dos estudos culturais sobre a diáspora. Focaliza-se o livro de memórias da autora, The woman warrior – memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts, publicado pela primeira vez em 1976. Desde meados do século XVIII, um grande número de imigrantes asiáticos deslocou-se para os Estados Unidos, trazendo consigo seus próprios valores materiais e espirituais e seus distintos padrões de comportamento. A formação das gerações que cresceram nessa encruzilhada de culturas só poderia ser difícil e conflituosa. Esta dissertação procura descobrir, por um lado, como se efetivam os processos de identificação dos sino-americanos, visto que estão sujeitos a dois sistemas de valor diferentes e, por outro, como se articulam os diversos elementos culturais, tanto na constituição da identidade das personagens como na construção do romance. As narrativas de Maxine Hong Kingston revelam processos de hibridização, característicos de um autor diaspórico. / This dissertation deals with the processes of identity formation as observed in the works of the Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, especially in her book The woman warrior – memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts, first published in 1976. The different meanings of subjectivity that can take shape in an American of Chinese descent, encompassing an individual’s contradictions and fragmentation, are analyzed. The theoretical framework is based on critics of postmodernism and on cultural studies about diasporas. Since the middle of the eighteenth century a great number of Asian immigrants moved to the United States, taking along with them their different values and behavior patterns. A person growing up in the intersection of cultures has to deal with conflicts and paradoxes, resulting in identities that are contradictory and fragmentary. This dissertation seeks to unravel, on one hand, the processes of identity formation among the Chinese-Americans, faced as they are by two distinct value systems. On the other hand, find out how the different cultural elements are articulated both in the identity formation of the characters and in the construction of the novel. The narratives of Maxine Hong Kingston reveal processes of hybridization, which are characteristic of a diasporic author.

Despite calls by U.S. researchers and policymakers for more teachers of color, supported by research documenting the significant social, emotional, and academic benefits of having same-race and same-ethnicity teachers, teaching remains an overwhelmingly White profession, even in light of demographic shifts rendering children of color the numeric majority in U.S. pre/schools. Relatedly, even as over one-fourth of children in the U.S. are immigrants, immigrant and transmigrant teachers have been marginalized in teacher education. Seeking to address this problem from a political-ideological paradigmatic perspective, this study sought to learn from transmigrant teachers’ negotiations of identities and practices. Rejecting essentialized notions of immigrant teachers/communities and focusing on Chinese transmigrant teachers teaching Chinese immigrants and children of immigrants, it sought to understand how they negotiated their teacher identities and pedagogical practices in light of occupational, geographical, and migrational intersections of identities and experiences. Further, it sought to document how these were enacted in early childhood public school classrooms. Situated in New York City, home to the largest Chinese and Chinese-American population of any city outside Asia, this collective case study centered the voices, identities, and experiences of three Chinese transmigrant early childhood teachers via Thirdspace theory, bridging identity, and transnational funds of knowledge. Doing so accounted for their individuality and collectivity. Analytically, • Thirdspace theory was used to map how they reconciled transnational identities, experiences, and pedagogical practices in the classroom; • bridging identity helped deepen understandings of how they constructed a professional/occupational identity influenced by, but not limited to, past biographical experiences; and • transnational funds of knowledge epitomized their lived experiences resulting from transnational navigations and/or belonging to transnational communities, capturing the complex flow of knowledges that characterized their experiences and pedagogies. Findings shed light onto the power and potential of Chinese transmigrant early childhood teachers in the education of Chinese immigrant children. Implications underscore the need for teacher education to learn from the experiences of international teacher candidates, recognizing how they may serve as role models for all students while improving the outcomes and school experiences of immigrant students, leveraging the simultaneity of experiences, identities, and experiences in the construction of Thirdspace classrooms.

In any study of physical fitness or of nutritional well-being of a group of people, a knowledge of the normal height and weight of that group serves as a valuable guide. Thus, Height-Weight-Age tables have been prepared and are being used in schools, gymnasiums, camps, etc., as a gauge of physical development in children. However, for the group of Chinese school children in the United States very little work has been done to determine the normal height range and weight at the different ages and the normal height-weight-age relationships. Because of the lack of data on the normal weights and heights of Chinese school children, the writer, who had previously attempted a survey and study of malnutrition among Chinese school children in Stockton, California, found that she has no means to gauge her measurements. The tables prepared for Caucasian children are always available and can be referred to, of course; but can height-weight-age standards which are based on measurements of Caucasian children serve as standards by which Chinese children could be judged? This study was undertaken in order to throw light on that question and to serve as accurate and contemporaneous material for preparing height-weight-age tables for Chinese school children in Northern California, should the final analysis prove that tables prepared for Caucasian children cannot be adapted for their use.

Using Scheper-Hughes and Locke's "Mindful Body" (1987) as a theoretical framework, this thesis seeks to examine how Alzheimer's disease (1) impacts Chinese and Taiwanese American elders and their caregivers, (2) is felt through the relationships and social interactions of the Chinese and Taiwanese American individuals interviewed, and (3) is experienced through the complex overlapping of culture, politics, and institutions in Boston and beyond. In order to understand the impact of Alzheimer's disease on Chinese and Taiwanese American families living in Boston, qualitative interviews of health care professionals, community members, Chinese and Taiwanese American elderly, and Alzheimer's disease caregivers were conducted and analyzed. Furthermore, participant observation at a Chinese American adult day health center, dementia review meetings, and various public lectures on Alzheimer's disease and the Chinese and Taiwanese American communities were attended. This case study demonstrates that for the Chinese and Taiwanese American communities, Alzheimer's disease is a social disease. It exists within family relationships of elder and caregiver, and for families, it is the gradual degeneration of these relationships that is at the heart of meaning of this illness' lived-experience.

No description available.

Racism and sexism pervaded American society during the nineteenth century, creating unusual disadvantaged conditions for Chinese immigrant women. As a weak minority in an alien and often hostile environment and as a subordinate sex in a sexist society, Chinese women suffered from double oppression of racism and sexism. In addition, the Chinese cultural values of women's passivity and submission existed within Chinese communities in America, and affected the lives of these immigrant women. This work uses government document, historical statistics, accounts from newspapers and literature to examine the life experiences of Chinese immigrant women and American attitudes towards them, and to analyze the roots of the oppression of racism and sexism. / Master of Arts