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Effects of social capital on the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant children

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Effects of social capital on the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant children

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EFFECTS OF SOCIAL CAPITAL ON THE PSYCHOSOCIAL ADJUSTMENT OF
CHINESE MIGRANT CHILDREN

by
Qiaobing Wu

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SOCIAL WORK)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Qiaobing Wu

ii
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my mentor, Dr.
Larry Palinkas, who has given me never-ending support throughout my doctoral study.
He is not only my academic advisor, but a role model and a father for my life. His
guidance, understanding, intellectual stimulation, emotional comforting, and
empowerment are largely responsible for my accomplishments up to this point. For
everything you have done for me, Larry, I thank you!
I gratefully acknowledge my dissertation committee co-chair, Dr. Andy Johnson,
who has given me the highly valuable multidisciplinary training and brought me into the
wonderland of health sciences. The experiences working on the research team he leads
has established a solid foundation for my independent research. I would also like to thank
my two other dissertation committee members: Dr. Kristin Ferguson, who is always
readily available to provide me with guidance and support of all kinds since I began the
doctoral program; and Dr. Paula Palmer, with whom working is always a joyful
experience and the friendship sits in the core of the mentoring and collaboration.
I want to express my heartfelt thanks to Dean Marilyn Flynn, who gave me a home
since the first day I came to USC and closely watched my professional and personal
growth over the years. I want to thank Dr. Bruce Jansson, Chair of the Ph.D. program,
who first brought me to the school and has given me unfailing support in many aspects of
my study and life. I would like to thank people who I have ever worked with or received
mentorship from at various stages of my doctoral education: Dr. Michalle Mor Barak, Dr.
John Brekke, Dr. Iris Chi, Dr. Penelope Trickett, and Dr. Bin Xie, I would also like to
extend my thanks to the USC School of Social Work, which provided me with such a
iii
supportive and resourceful environment and has nurtured my passion and competence for
a career in academia.
I need to acknowledge the National Science Foundation for awarding me the
Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, and the China Times Cultural Foundation for
the China Times Young Scholar Award, which provided important financial support for
my dissertation study. I would also like to thank Dr. Xuesong He, my research
collaborator in China, who made a great contribution to the data collection phase of my
study.
Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my loving family: my husband
Mo, my parents, my sisters, my brother-in-laws, and my dear nieces and nephews. It is
their strong faith in me, their enduring encouragement, and their everlasting support that
walk me through this long journey. The accomplishment would have not meant so much
to me without them sharing the pride and joy. My dear family, I love you all!

iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………….....ii

List of Tables ..................................................................................................................... vi

List of Figures................................................................................................................... vii

Abstract............................................................................................................................viii

Chapter 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1

Chapter 2 Effects of Social Capital on the Psychosocial Adjustment of Chinese
Migrant Children: An Ecological Framework .................................................................. 14
Introduction................................................................................................................... 14
Psychosocial Adjustment of Migrant Children ……………………………………. 17
Effects of Social Capital on the Development of Children and Adolescents 18
Methods......................................................................................................................... 25
Participants and Procedure …………………………………………………………25
Measures …………………………………………………………………………... 29
Data Analysis ……………………………………………………………………… 37
Results........................................................................................................................... 37
Test of Measurement Model ………………………………………………………. 37
Test of Structural Model …………………………………………………………... 39
Discussion..................................................................................................................... 44
Implications for Theory, Practice, Policy, and Future Research .................................. 50
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 56

Chapter 3 Social Capital in Promoting the Psychosocial Adjustment of Chinese
Migrant Children: Interaction across Contexts................................................................. 57
Introduction................................................................................................................... 57
Psychosocial Adjustment of Migrant Children in Mainland China ……………….. 58
Effects of Social Capital on the Development of Children and Adolescents ……... 61
The Interplay among Different Dimensions of Social Capital ……………………. 63
Methods......................................................................................................................... 68
Participants and Procedure ………………………………………………………... 68
Measures …………………………………………………………………………... 70
Data Analysis ……………………………………………………………………… 78
Results........................................................................................................................... 79
Test of Measurement Model ………………………………………………………. 79
Test of Structural Model …………………………………………………………... 81
Discussion..................................................................................................................... 87
Implications for Theory, Practice, Policy, and Future Research .................................. 93
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 97

v
Chapter 4 Development and Use of Social Capital in the Psychosocial Adjustment of
Chinese Migrant Children: The Role of Children’s Personal Agency ............................. 99
Introduction................................................................................................................... 99
Psychosocial Adjustment of Migrant Children in Mainland China ……………… 101
Effects of Social Capital on the Development of Children and Adolescents ……. 103
The Role of Children’s Personal Agency ………………………………………... 105
Methods....................................................................................................................... 109
Overall Design …………………………………………………………………… 109
Participants and Procedure ………………………………………………………. 111
Measures …………………………………………………………………………. 114
Data Analysis …………………………………………………………………….. 122
Results......................................................................................................................... 123
Test of Measurement Model ……………………………………………………... 123
Test of Structural Model …………………………………………………………. 125
Results of Qualitative Analyses ………………………………………………….. 130
Discussion................................................................................................................... 135
Implications for Theory, Practice, Policy, and Future Research ................................ 140
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 144

Chapter 5 Conclusions and Implications ........................................................................ 145
Summary of Major Research Findings ....................................................................... 146
Study Limitations........................................................................................................ 148
Implications for Theory, Practice, Policy and Future Research ................................. 149
Implications for Theory ………………………………………………………….. 149
Implications for Practice and Policy ……………………………………………... 150
Implications for Future Research ………………………………………………… 154

References....................................................................................................................... 157

Appendices...................................................................................................................... 168
Appendix I: List of Constructs and Variables............................................................. 168
Appendix II: Measurement of Children’s Personal Agency....................................... 169

vi
List of Tables

Table 2.1 Descriptive Statistics of Sample Characteristics ............................................ 28

Table 2.2 Standardized Factor Loadings of Observed Variables on Latent
Constructs ....................................................................................................... 39

Table 2.3 Standardized Direct, Indirect, and Total Effects of Major Predictor
Variables on Children’s Psychosocial Adjustment......................................... 44

Table 3.1 Comparison of the Fit of Alternative Models: Multiple Group Analysis
with Community Social Capital as Moderator................................................ 81

Table 3.2 Across-Group Unstandardized and Standardized Coefficients of
Structural Paths Linking Social Capital to Psychosocial Adjustment ............ 83

Table 3.3 Standardized Direct, Indirect, and Total Effects of Major Predictor
Variables on Children’s Psychosocial Adjustment......................................... 86

Table 4.1 Fits of Measurement and Structural Models................................................. 125

Table 4.2 Comparison of the Fit of Alternative Models (Multiple Group
Analysis with Children’s Personal Agency as Moderator)........................... 126

Table 4.3 Standardized Total Effects of Major Predictor Variables on Children’s
Psychosocial Adjustment in both High and Low Personal Agency
Groups........................................................................................................... 128

vii
List of Figures

Figure 1.1 Conceptual Framework .................................................................................... 9

Figure 2.1 Hypothesized Model of Social Capital Effects on the Psychosocial
Adjustment of Chinese Migrant Children....................................................... 24

Figure 2.2 Standardized Solutions for the Structural Model of Social Capital
Effects on the Psychosocial Adjustment of Chinese Migrant Children.......... 40

Figure 3.1 Hypothesized Model of Social Capital Effects on the Psychosocial
Adjustment of Chinese Migrant Children....................................................... 67

Figure 3.2 Standardized Solutions for the Multi-Group Structural Model of Social
Capital Effects on the Psychosocial Adjustment of Chinese Migrant
Children: Community Social Capital as Moderator ...................................... 84

Figure 4.1 Hypothesized Model of Social Capital Effects on the Psychosocial
Adjustment of Chinese Migrant Children with Children’s Personal
Agency as Moderator.................................................................................... 110

viii
Abstract
This dissertation research applies the social capital theory to investigate how
social capital embedded in the family, school, peer, and community influence the
psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant children independently, jointly, and
interactively. Adopting a mixed-method design, and drawing on a sample of 772 pairs of
migrant children and their parents living in Shanghai, China, this study addresses three
major research questions: 1) How do family, school, peer and community social capital
influence the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children in mainland China as they
exist simultaneously? 2) What are the mechanisms by which various dimensions of social
capital interact with each other to influence children’s psychosocial adjustment? And 3)
How does children’s personal agency in generating and mobilizing each dimension of
social capital moderate the effect of that type of social capital on their psychosocial
adjustment?
Findings of this study suggest that, family, school, and peer social capital
significantly influence the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children directly and
positively; they also entirely mediate the effect of community social capital on the child’s
adjustment. In addition, the effect of family social capital is contingent on the stock of
community social capital, where higher levels of community social capital boosters the
effect of family social capital on children’s psychosocial adjustment. Moreover,
children’s personal agency in generating and mobilizing social capital plays a significant
role in magnifying the positive effects of family, school, and peer social capital, but not
in modifying the function of community social capital.
ix
This dissertation research advances social capital theory by demonstrating the
multidimensional nature of social capital and by taking into account children’s personal
agency as a potential modifier of the social capital effects. It also advances the theory by
testing it in a non-western socio-cultural context, thus potentially fortifying its universal
applicability. The study proposes a social capital building model for social work practice
and social policy. It emphasizes combined investment in multiple dimensions of social
capital at both the mezzo and macro level. The study also informs future research to
adopt longitudinal and comparative designs to further understand the functioning of
social capital within various populations and socio-cultural contexts.
1
Chapter 1 Introduction
The internal migration of mainland China is characterized by a population flow from
rural to urban areas in search of better living conditions. In recent years, increasing
numbers of children have migrated to cities with their parents. By November 1, 2000,
there were already more than 100 million migrants in mainland China (National Bureau
of Statistics, 2000). Of these, 19,820,000 (19.37%) were children under the age of 18
(National Working Committee on Children and Women, 2003). The population of
migrants and the proportion of migrant children are even more striking in cities where
migrants most concentrated. For example, by the end of the year 2000, there were 3.87
million migrants inhabiting in Shanghai, of which 320,000 were children and adolescents
at school age (Li, 2004). The number of migrants increased to 4.98 million by August 1,
2003, and amounted to 5.81 million by the end of 2005, of which 4.38 million had lived
in Shanghai for more than half a year, accounting for 24.6 percent of the city’s entire
population (China Business News, 2007). It is anticipated that by 2010, one third of
Shanghai’s residents will be migrants (China Business News, 2007).
However, under China’s household registration system (hukou), which is usually
assigned at birth and has been designed to control rural-urban mobility for economic and
political purposes, migrant children are not granted equal access to education, medical
care, and many other social services, due to urban residence requirements. Traditionally
the local government where a child’s hukou is registered is solely responsible for
providing her/him with an education. Large numbers of migrant children are thus denied
entry into public schools in the city and are forced to enroll in the so-called “migrant
children’s schools”, which are of significantly lower quality in terms of facilities and
2
human resources. Although recent policies have sought to solve this problem and the
government requires public schools to accommodate migrant children, the delay in policy
implementation perpetuates a harsh situation. This pattern of exclusion also extends into
other arenas of the children’s life, such as limited access to medical care, and living in the
marginal areas of cities called “urban villages”. Presumably, the structural barriers of
segregation and discrimination pose many threats to the psychosocial adjustment of
migrant children, that is, their psychological well-being and performance in social
contexts, as they are faced with multiple difficulties adapting to the new urban
environments. These adjustment problems may undermine their future development in a
variety of areas and cause other social problems with potentially high social costs.
Despite their large numbers, migrant children are a newly emerging population and
largely understudied. Although issues of their education have been addressed in previous
research (Han, 2001), little has been done to understand patterns and processes of their
psychosocial adjustment. To facilitate healthier adaptation of the migrant children and to
maintain the stability of the urban society whose future depends largely on them,
systematic research is urgently needed to better understand the social and environmental
determinants of their psychosocial adjustment.
In the Western literature, numerous studies have demonstrated that immigrant
children are at higher risk for developing adjustment problems either as a direct result of
immigration stress or indirectly through parental distress and disrupted family context
(Short & Johnston, 1997). These adjustment problems include low self-esteem,
depression, anxiety, stress, hostility, aggression, and deviant behaviors (Bankston &
Zhou, 2002a, 2002b; Baptiste, 1993; Fuligni, 1998; Rumbaut, 1994). A typical approach
3
to investigating the adjustment of immigrant children involves using the resilience
framework, which attempts to examine the risk and protective factors that influence
children’s various developmental outcomes (Fraser, Kirby, & Smokowski, 2004). Risk
factors refer to any influences that contribute to increased probability of harm, digression
to a more serious state, or maintenance of a problem condition (Coie et al., 1993), while
protective factors refer to internal and external resources that promote positive
developmental outcomes and help children prevail over adversity (Garmezy, 1993).
Furthermore, application of the resilience framework was typically coupled with an
ecological or multisystems perspective; that is, risk and protective factors were examined
across a range of social arenas in the ecological system wherein children grow and
develop, including the family, school, peer, and neighborhood (Bronfenbrenner, 1989;
Fraser, Kirby, & Smokowski, 2004). Recent development of the resilience literature has
suggested a paradigm shift from focusing on the adversity of an individual to
emphasizing how the strengths of an individual could be mobilized to overcome adversity
and achieve personal growth (Michaud, 2006; Wong, 2008). Consequently, it suggests
putting more efforts into exploring protective factors that enhance the capacity of an
individual to transcend life difficulties (Michaud, 2006). It embraces the idea that the
development of intervention plans would benefit more from identifying the protective
factors in the social and ecological contexts in order to promote the healthy adjustment of
children and adolescents.
In exploring the protective factors inherent in the children’s social contexts that
relate to their psychosocial adjustment, social capital has emerged as an increasingly
influential concept (Portes, 1998). The original insight of social capital can be traced
4
back to the classic sociological views of Durkheim (1958), who maintained that
individual behavior should be seen as the product of the degree of integration of
individuals in their society, and of Marx, who made the distinction between an atomized
class-in-itself and a mobilized class-for-itself, both of which pointed out implicitly a
critical heuristic power of social capital: the positive consequences of sociability on
individuals (Portes, 1998). However, it was not until the mid 1980s that social capital was
proposed as a systematic concept at the first time by Pierre Bourdieu, who defined it as
“the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a
durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance or
recognition” (Bourdieu, 1985, p. 248). This instrumental definition of social capital
focused on the benefits accruing to individuals by virtue of participation in groups and
construction of sociability, and is decomposable into two elements: the social relationship
itself that allows individuals to claim access to resources possessed by their associates,
and the amount and quality of those resources. Bourdieu’s conceptualization of social
capital serves as a theoretical foundation for scholars to approach the concept with their
own emphases and to extend the application of social capital into a variety of fields of
research. Of these scholars, Coleman has been acknowledged as one of the most
significant contributors to the social capital literature who had conducted seminal work
on the association between social capital and developmental outcomes of children and
youths.
According to Coleman (1990, p.302), social capital refers to resources inherent in
social relationships that facilitate a social outcome. In line with the ecological perspective,
social capital can occur at any level of social aggregation (Parcel & Menaghan, 1993).
5
Family, school, peer groups, and community are the key social contexts in which these
resources reside for children. The concept of social capital “provides a conceptual link
between the attributes of individual actors and their immediate social contexts”; as such,
it has the potential to link “the overly narrow purview of psychology and the overly broad
purview of sociology” (Furstenberg & Hughes, 1995, p.582). Employing Coleman’s
conceptualization, research on immigrant children has indicated that social capital within
the family and community, reflected by the bonds between parents and children or
between parents and parents in the same neighborhood, is associated with children’s
positive adjustment including lower levels of depression (Stevenson, 1998), fewer
behavior problems (Parcel & Dufur, 2001; Parcel & Menaghan, 1993), decreased
likelihood of school dropout (Coleman & Hoffer, 1987; Coleman, 1988; Croninger & Lee,
2001; Teachman et al., 1996), higher educational aspiration (McNeal, 1999), and better
academic performance (Coleman, 1988; Coleman & Hoffer, 1987; Hao & Bonstead-
Bruns, 1998; Sun, 1998, 1999; Valenzuela & Dornbusch, 1994; White & Glick, 2000;
Zhou & Bankston, 1994). Family social capital plays an intermediate role in transmitting
parental resources or family norms to children through interactions, while community
social capital establishes an extra-familiar social network that provides social control and
monitoring functions for children living in the neighborhood (Coleman, 1988, 1990), and
meanwhile increasing the family’s access to more social resources through relationships
and interactions at the community level (Furstenberg & Hughes, 1995; Teachman et al.,
1996).
Another well recognized scholar in the discourse of social capital, Putnam, placed a
stronger emphasis on the collective nature of social capital, considering it as “features of
6
social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination
and collaboration for mutual benefit” (Putnam, 1995, p. 67). It denotes social ties and
social networks that help people get by or get ahead, given the premise that social
connectedness would yield benefits to the individual (Putnam, 2000). Studies employing
this thread of conceptualization of social capital have typically assessed social capital at
the community level and have demonstrated its positive effects on the health, mental
health, health-related quality of life, and decreased likelihood of deviant and delinquent
behaviors of children and adolescents (Drukker, Kaplan, Feron, & Von Os, 2003;
Drukker, Buka, Kaplan, McKenzie, & Van Os, 2005; Putnam, 2000). Less studied, social
capital embedded in the school, usually manifested in student-teacher relationships, and
social capital embedded in peer groups as manifested by peer relationships, have also
been found to exert significant effects on children’s adjustment outcomes related to
school performance (Croninger & Lee, 2001; Parcel & Dufur, 2001; Ream, 2003, 2005).
Despite the extensive evidence of the association between social capital and the
psychosocial adjustment of children and adolescents, certain gaps remain in the literature
due to constraints of design or measurement in existing research. First, previous research
has tended to focus on limited dimensions of social capital, thus failing to examine how
social capital embedded in various social contexts differ in affecting children’s
adjustment as they exist simultaneously. They also failed to reveal the mechanism by
which various dimensions of social capital interact with each other to exert a specific
effect. This lack of knowledge has inhibited the translation of research into effective
policy and intervention. For policymakers and practitioners to efficiently allocate limited
resources and efforts, it is important to recognize the effects of each dimension of social
7
capital on children’s psychosocial adjustment and determine whether the various
dimensions of social capital exert synergistic effects on child’s adjustment. Second,
previous research has failed to take into consideration the fact that children, as
independent agents, may actively generate, draw on, or negotiate their own social capital,
thus affecting the way that social capital works (Morrow, 1996, 1999). This has
constrained our ability to fully exploit the potential of social capital for the healthier
adjustment of children, especially in terms of utilizing the potential of children
themselves in the development and use of social capital. Drawing on the sociology of
childhood (James & Prout, 1990) and building on the notion of self-efficacy (Bandura,
1977), it is conceivable that social capital would be more effective in facilitating
children’s psychosocial adjustment as it is constructed through individual initiative and
efforts. Such initiative and efforts, termed “personal agency” in this study, would be
especially important for migrant children in China, who have limited access to resources
in their various social contexts due to their marginalized status. Third, most of the
previous research on the psychosocial sequelae of social capital has been limited to
individuals and communities in the United States; there is a need to confirm the cross-
cultural utility and validity of the theory, particularly in China where individual behavior
has traditionally been more heavily regulated by social obligations than is the case in
western societies like the United States.
This dissertation research drew upon social capital theory to harness the resilience
and ecological perspectives to investigate the psychosocial adjustment of migrant
children in Shanghai, China, one of the country’s largest metropolises that host a majority
of its migrant population. Migrant status was the common risk factor for the children’s
8
psychosocial adjustment, while social capital embedded in their ecological environment,
namely, the family, school, peer, and community, were hypothesized to function as
protective factors on their psychosocial adjustment. To fill the gaps in the literature, this
study addressed two specific aims: 1) to identify the mechanism by which social capital
embedded in a range of children’s socio-ecological systems, namely, the family, school,
peer, and community, influences the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children in the
Chinese social context; and 2) to investigate how the personal agency of migrant children
influences the functioning of social capital on their psychosocial adjustment. Research
questions that guided this research include: 1) How do family, school, peer, and
community social capital influence the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children in
mainland China, and how do their effects differ from each other? 2) Do some types of
social capital (e.g., family social capital) mediate the effects of other types of social
capital (e.g., community social capital) on the children’s psychosocial adjustment? 3) Do
some types of social capital (e.g., community social capital) moderate the effects of other
types of social capital (e.g., school social capital) on the children’s psychosocial
adjustment? And 4) Does the extent of personal agency of migrant children in generating
and mobilizing each dimension of social capital moderate the effect of that type of social
capital on their psychosocial adjustment?
Responding to the research questions, the overall conceptual framework of this study
was developed as displayed below in Figure 1.1. Psychosocial adjustment of migrant
children was the target outcome variable, which included measures of self-esteem,
depressive symptoms, hostility, and life satisfaction. The four dimensions of social
capital, family social capital (FSC), community social capital (CSC), school social
9
capital (SSC), and peer social capital (PSC), and the personal agency of children in
generating and mobilizing each dimension of social capital, were the key predictor
variables. Overall, this study attempted to investigate the complex interplay among
multiple dimensions of social capital as they function on the psychosocial adjustment of
migrant children, as well as the moderating effect of the child’s personal agency on the
associations between each dimension of social capital and the adjustment outcomes. In
Figure 1.1, the arrows marked as a1-a4 represent the direct effects of social capital on the
children’s psychosocial adjustment; the arrows marked as b1-b5 represent the potential
moderating effects of certain dimensions of social capital; and the arrows marked as c1-
c4 represent the potential moderating effects of the child’s personal agency.
Figure 1.1 Conceptual Framework

CSC
Personal Agency
a2
a1
a3
b1
b2
c1
c3
c2
FSC
PSC
SSC

Psychosocial
Adjustment

Self-esteem

Depressive
symptoms

Hostility

Life
satisfaction
a4
b3
c4
b5
b4
10
Based on the conceptual framework, this dissertation was composed of three
interrelated studies, each responding to a particular research question and testing a certain
portion of the conceptual model. Study 1, “Effects of social capital on the psychosocial
adjustment of Chinese migrant children: An ecological framework”, incorporated all four
dimensions of social capital and investigated how they operated on the psychosocial
adjustment of migrant children while they existed simultaneously, as well as how they
differed from each other in their effects on the adjustment outcomes. It also tested the
mediating pathways linking community social capital to the children’s psychosocial
adjustment through the effects of other dimensions of social capital. Study 2, “Social
capital in promoting the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant children:
Interactions across contexts”, examined the interactions among various dimensions of
social capital as they operated on the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children.
Specifically, it examined the moderating effect of community social capital on the
associations between the other three dimension of social capital and the children’s
psychosocial adjustment. Given the identified differences in the functioning of family
social capital between the two groups with higher and lower community social capital, it
further examined the moderating effect of school social capital on the associations
between family and peer social capital and the psychosocial adjustment of migrant
children within the high and low community social capital groups respectively. Study 3,
“Development and use of social capital in the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese
migrant children: The role of children’s personal agency”, investigated the role that
children’s personal agency in generating and mobilizing social capital played in
modifying the effects of various dimensions of social capital on the psychosocial
11
adjustment of migrant children. Each dimension of social capital was examined
separately in testing the moderating effect of personal agency in constructing that
particular dimension of social capital, thus forming four hypothesized models to test in
the study.
This dissertation study adopted a mixed method design. It followed the “QUAN +
qual” paradigm, in which the quantitative study served as the dominant design to test the
theoretical model, while results of the quantitative study were interpreted in further depth
through additional explanations and illustrations generated by supplementary qualitative
data (Morse, 2003). Use of the mixed method design, as suggested by Morse (2003),
facilitated a more complete and comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon under
investigation. The present study was conducted through three phases in Shanghai, China.
In phase I, a pilot study was conducted with a convenient sample of 100 migrant children
in Shanghai to field test the survey questionnaires to be used in phase II, and 10 semi-
structured interviews with migrant children were conducted to inform the development of
the child personal agency scale. In phase II, a survey was conducted with a random
sample of 815 migrant students from 14 elementary and junior high schools of Shanghai.
One parent of each of the participating students who considered herself/himself most
knowledgeable about their family and neighborhood was also recruited for the study and
was asked to complete a separate questionnaire. This resulted in a final sample of 772
pairs of migrant children and their parents for analysis. In phase III, semi-structured
interviews were conducted with 20 migrant children to complement the findings from the
quantitative analysis and to achieve in-depth understanding and interpretation of the
results. The procedure of the study and all consent forms and measurement instruments
12
were approved and monitored by the Institutional Review Board of the University of
Southern California, and were in compliance with the ethical standards for research
involving human subjects.
Just as the long-term consequences of migration in the United States have been more
closely linked with the second generation and its chances for successful adaptation
(Portes & Hao, 2004), the future of China’s urban society is also largely dependent on the
development of migrant children. Undoubtedly, migrant children merit urgent attention
by research given their rapid growth, great vulnerability, and lack of systematic
investigation. This dissertation study represents a pioneering effort to fulfill this need.
Findings from this research will make significant contributions to knowledge in the fields
of migration and social capital in a variety of ways. In terms of theory, this study will
expand the sociological theory of social capital by incorporating family, school, peer and
community social capital into one conceptual framework, thus enabling the simultaneous
examination of social capital across multiple socio-ecological contexts, as well as
facilitating the investigation of the complex interplay among multiple dimensions of
social capital in affecting children’s adjustment. It also advances social capital theory by
taking into account the children’s personal agency in generating and mobilizing social
capital as a potential modifier of social capital effects. Furthermore, it contributes to our
understanding of how social capital operates in a non-western socio-cultural context, thus
potentially fortifying its universal applicability. Knowing the functioning of social capital
among migrant children in mainland China would also inform the research on Chinese
immigrant children in the United States, considering the underlying shared culture
between these two populations. Practically, findings of this study will offer important
13
guidance on the design and delivery of social service programs. Effects of social capital
on the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children imply utilizing social capital building
as an innovative approach to promoting the positive adjustment of this population.
Interventions may devote special efforts to constructing social capital inherent in
particular social contexts according to their relative effectiveness. Informed by the
interaction effects among various dimensions of social capital, interventions may also
intentionally build efficient combinations of social capital to facilitate its highest possible
positive effect on the favorable adjustment outcomes of migrant children. In addition,
intervention programs may adopt empowerment strategies to draw upon the migrant
children’s personal agency to magnify the benefits of social capital. Lastly, at the
structural and policy level, the research findings will also inform government officials as
to which dimension(s) of social capital are most critical for the psychosocial adjustment
of migrant children and how resources should be elicited and allocated to constructing
particular dimensions of social capital in order to reach the best efficiency.

14
Chapter 2 Effects of Social Capital on the Psychosocial Adjustment of Chinese
Migrant Children: An Ecological Framework

Introduction
Social capital has been an increasingly popular concept in examining the social
determinants of health and well-being (Kawachi, Subramanian, & Kim, 2008; O’Brien,
Burdsal, & Molgaard, 2004; Portes, 1998; Putnam, 2000). Numerous studies have
investigated the role of social capital in the development of children and adolescents,
including their psychosocial adjustment (Dorsey & Forehand, 2003; Morrow, 1999).
Many of these studies examined the adjustment of immigrant children and adolescents
(Coleman, 1988, 1990; Hao & Bonstead-Bruns, 1998; Sun, 1999; Zhou & Bankston,
1994). However, to the author’s knowledge, the theoretical framework of social capital
has never been used to examine the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children in
mainland China.
The internal migration of mainland China is characterized by a population flow from
rural to urban areas in search of better living conditions. In recent years, the number of
children who have migrated to cities with their parents has increased. According to the
2000 census, there were a total of 121,070,000 migrants in China (National Bureau of
Statistics, 2000). Of these, 19.37 percent were children under age 18 (National Working
Committee on Children and Women, 2003). By the end of 2000, there were 3.87 million
migrants in Shanghai alone, of which 320,000 were school age children (Li, 2004). The
number of migrants increased to 4.98 million by August 1, 2003, and amounted to 5.81
million by the end of 2005, of which 4.38 million had lived in Shanghai for more than
15
half a year, accounting for 24.6 percent of the city’s entire population (China Business
News, 2007). In three of Shanghai’s 19 districts, the number of migrants has surpassed
that of native urban residents. It is anticipated that by 2010, one third of Shanghai’s
population will be composed of migrants (China Business News, 2007).
The continuously growing population of migrant children has evoked increasing
attention from the government and society at large. However, under China’s household
registration system (hukou), which is usually assigned at birth and has been designed to
control rural-urban mobility for economic and political purposes, migrant children are not
granted equal access to education, medical care, and many other social services, due to
urban residence requirements. Traditionally the local government where a child’s hukou
is registered is solely responsible for providing her/him with an education. Large
numbers of migrant children are thus denied entry into public schools in the city and are
forced to enroll in the so-called “migrant children’s schools”, which are of significantly
lower quality in terms of facilities and human resources. Recent policies have sought to
address this problem and the government requires public schools to accommodate
migrant children. Nevertheless, the delay in policy implementation perpetuates a harsh
situation. This pattern of exclusion also extends into other arenas of children’s lives, such
as limited access to medical care and living in the marginal areas of cities known as
“urban villages”. Presumably, the structural barriers of segregation and discrimination
pose many threats to the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children as they are faced
with numerous obstacles to successful adaptation to the new urban environments. These
adjustment problems may undermine their future development in a variety of areas and
cause other problems with potentially high social costs.
16
Despite their large numbers, migrant children are a newly emerging population and
largely understudied. Although issues of their education have been addressed in previous
research (Han, 2001), little has been done to understand patterns and processes of their
psychosocial adjustment. To facilitate healthier adaptation of the migrant children and to
maintain the stability of the urban society whose future depends largely on them,
systematic research is urgently needed to better understand the social and environmental
determinants of their psychosocial adjustment.
The objective of this study was to investigate how social resources embedded in the
family, school, peer, and community influenced the psychosocial adjustment of migrant
children in Shanghai, China. Social capital theory provides a useful framework and is
organized within an ecological framework, which considers the development of children
and adolescents as taking place within a set of embedded social contexts or ecological
systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1989). The study was designed to address three major research
questions: 1) how does each of the four dimensions of social capital (i.e., family, school,
peer, and community) influence the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant children
when they exist simultaneously; 2) how does each dimension of social capital exhibit a
unique effect on psychosocial adjustment; and 3) what are the mechanisms by which
various dimensions of social capital impact children’s psychosocial adjustment?
Understanding the functioning of multiple dimensions of social capital would enable
policy makers and service practitioners to allocate limited resources to build social capital
in particular domains of the child’s social environment, thus maximizing the
effectiveness and efficiency of policy and intervention programs.

17
Psychosocial Adjustment of Migrant Children
Psychosocial adjustment is an umbrella term that refers to various aspects of a
child’s psychological well-being and performance in social contexts. Little is known
about the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children in mainland China. However,
research in Western societies has demonstrated that immigrant children are at higher risk
of developing adjustment problems either as a direct result of immigration stress or
indirectly through parental distress and disrupted family context (Short & Johnston,
1997). They face a number of challenges that include adapting to a new school and social
environment, segregation, prejudice, marginalization, and changes in family ecologies
(Baptiste, 1993; Chan, Ip, & Yuen, 1996; Chiu et al., 1992). In an overview of existing
research on immigrant children, problems related to their adjustment include low self-
esteem, depression, anxiety, stress, hostility, aggression, and deviant behaviors (Bankston
& Zhou, 2002a; Baptiste, 1993; Jaycox et al., 2002; Padilla & Duran, 1995; Rumbaut,
1994). Of the limited number of Chinese studies that looked at the psychological well-
being of migrant children, Li and colleague’s (2008) study on 1018 migrant children and
319 native urban children in Beijing found that, levels of self-esteem of migrant children
were significantly lower than that of their non-migrant counterparts, and levels of self-
esteem of migrant children attending migrant children’s schools were significantly lower
than that of migrant children attending public school.
Common across previous research is that each study usually focused on one
particular adjustment outcome, or studied various adjustment outcomes separately.
Psychosocial adjustment has never been examined as one integral construct composed of
multiple facets as this umbrella term refers to in conceptualization. Considering there is
18
high comorbidity among various aspects of psychosocial adjustment (Holmbeck et al.,
2008; Tang, 2007), this study treated psychosocial adjustment as one inclusive construct
that encompassed four measures used by previous research as indicators of psychosocial
adjustment: self-esteem, depression, hostility, and life satisfaction. A comprehensive
assessment of these multiple facets of psychosocial adjustment will contribute to a more
complete understanding of the social and psychological well-being of children and
adolescents.

Effects of Social Capital on the Development of Children and Adolescents
In exploring the protective factors of various child and youth development outcomes,
social capital has become an increasingly popular concept. Following the seminal work
of Coleman (1990, p. 302), social capital refers to “social resources inherent in social
relationships that facilitate a social outcome”. It can occur at any level of social
aggregation (Parcel & Menaghan, 1993), and is usually operationalized as the features
and quality of social relationships in a range of social contexts (Coleman, 1990; Lin,
2001; Portes, 1998; Putnam, 2000). Social capital “provides a conceptual link between
the attributes of individual actors and their immediate social contexts, most notably the
household, school, and neighborhood” (Furstenberg & Hughes, 1995, p. 582). Coleman’s
work focused on social capital embedded in the family and the community.
Family social capital refers to the bonds between parents and children reflected in
the time and attention spent interacting with children, monitoring their activities, and
promoting their well-being and social adjustment (Coleman, 1990). In their study of
4,000 students from public schools, Coleman and Hoffer (1987) suggested that the larger
19
stock of family social capital was associated with increased likelihood of high school
completion. Coleman’s (1990) study of Asian immigrant families also demonstrated that
family social capital in the form of parental interests in children’s learning would help
generate human capital in the second generation even when the parents have little human
capital. In their longitudinal study of 492 adolescents followed up for thirteen years in
Toronto, Hagan et al (1996) confirmed Coleman’s finding about the detrimental effect of
migration on children’s emotional adjustment, and suggested that the detrimental effect
was partially neutralized among those who received more family support, because
parental support, as one kind of family social capital, compensated for the loss of social
bonds established in their former communities. In another study of Korean-American
families in Los Angeles, parental support and control over their children were found to be
largely responsible for their success in the public school system (Light, 1988). Social
capital in the presence of social support networks at the family level can also mediate the
negative emotional and behavioral patterns associated with economic hardship in
immigrant families and encourage parental warmth and acceptance, which then indirectly
promote positive functioning in children’s adjustment (Lou & Siantz, 1997). As many
studies suggest, family social capital is associated with fewer behavior problems (Parcel
& Dufur, 2001; Parcel & Menaghan, 1993), decreased likelihood of school dropout
(Coleman & Hoffer, 1987; Croninger & Lee, 2001), higher educational aspiration
(McNeal, 1999), and better academic achievement (Coleman, 1988; Coleman & Hoffer,
1987; Hao & Bonstead-Bruns, 1998; Valenzuela & Dornbusch, 1994; White & Glick,
2000). These effects essentially derive from the intermediate role that family social
20
capital plays in transmitting parental resources or family norms to children through
interactions (Coleman, 1988).
Community social capital. Social capital is also inherent in the neighborhoods where
families live. Neighborhoods provide the most proximal social context for families and
mold the experiences of parents and children by outlining the resources and opportunities
for families (Hughes, Furstenberg, & McDonald, 1998). Social capital embedded in
neighborhoods, termed community social capital, consists of social relationships among
parents or between parents and institutions within the neighborhood (Coleman, 1988). It
refers to the social connectedness among resident adults and youths, reflected by social
networks, norms, trust, a sense of belonging to the community, and civic engagement, all
of which facilitate collective actions for the public good (Putnam, 1993). Particularly for
studies of youth development, community social capital is also reflected by collective
efficacy, a concept which describes the level of active engagement by neighborhood
adults in the support and supervision of youths (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997).
Social capital in the community allows parents to “establish norms and reinforce each
other’s sanctioning of the children” (Coleman, 1990, p. 318); it establishes an extra-
familial social network that provides social control and monitoring functions for children
and youth living in the neighborhood (Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, Klebanov, & Sealand,
1993; Coleman, 1990; Sampson, 1997; Simons et al., 2004). Stevenson (1998) found that
low-income, inner-city African American adolescents living in neighborhoods with
higher social capital showed lower levels of depressive symptoms. A recent longitudinal
study in the Netherlands also suggested a significant association between community
social capital and child mental health (Drukker, Kaplan, Feron & Van Os, 2003).
21
Furthermore, the stability and strength of a community’s social structure play a vital
role in supporting the growth of social capital in the family. Community social capital
increases the family’s access to additional social resources through relationships and
interactions at the community level (Furstenberg & Hughes, 1995; Teachman et al.,
1996). It bolsters the efforts of parents on becoming informed of children’s adjustment
problems and seeking opportunities to discuss how to handle those problems (Dorsey &
Forehand, 2003). It is thought to support the growth of family social capital (Wickrama &
Bryant, 2003). This suggests a potential indirect pathway between community social
capital and children’s psychosocial adjustment, with family social capital acting as a
mediator.
School/peer social capital. Social capital in the school context and in the peer groups
have been rarely studied in the literature. However, school is the dominant extra-familial
institution in the early life course (Schneider & Coleman, 1993) which organizes the
social environment where children and youth spend a great part of their time. It not only
cultivates human capital—the skills, knowledge, and strategies that boost individual
productivity (Becker, 1962), but provides a primary site for social interaction, thus
constituting a major source of social capital (Harris, Duncan, & Boisjoly, 2002;
Kubitschek & Hallinan, 1998; Morgan & Sorenson, 1999). Croniger and Lee’s study
(2001) of 10,979 8
th
to 12
th
grade students found that, school social capital, as reflected
by student-teacher relationship (e.g., students’ belief about how teachers are interested in
them, value what they say, care about them, etc.) reduced the probability of dropping out
by nearly half. This association was especially salient among students coming from
socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Drawing on a nationally representative sample
22
(N=10,465) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health),
Crosnoe (2004) also found that students did perform better academically if the schools
had stronger student-teacher bonds. As far as peer social capital is concerned, Coleman
(1961) found children to be extraordinarily influenced by their peers, and more likely to
consider the ties with friends as more important than that with parents or teachers. In his
study of Mexican American achievement, Ream (2005) found peer social capital to be
robust and fungible resources that bolster the academic performance of secondary school
youths, where peer social capital was assessed by the density, range, intimacy, and
trusting level of peer relationships.
Despite the extensive evidence of the positive effects of social capital, certain gaps
clearly remain in the extant literature. First, although existing studies have examined a
variety of developmental outcomes of children and youth in relation to social capital,
very few studies focused on the effects of social capital on the psychosocial aspects of the
child’s development. Given the increasing acknowledgement of the power of social
capital theory in understanding individual health and well-being, it is worth systematic
examination to build knowledge on how social capital might relate to children’s
psychosocial outcomes. Social work practice with children and adolescents has yet to be
informed by research evidence of how the psychosocial adjustment of this population is
predicted by social and environmental factors. Second, most existing studies of social
capital have focused merely on one, or at most two, dimensions of social capital, and
examined their direct effects on various developmental outcomes. Although some studies
tried to tap the concept of social capital in a more comprehensive way through generating
a multidimensional index of social capital that assessed social resources in multiple
23
contexts (Fitzpatrick, Piko, Wright, & LaGory, 2005), the effects of social capital within
each context cannot be teased apart. This hinders the capacity of a study to examine the
mechanism by which various dimensions of social capital work together to influence the
development of children and adolescents as they exist simultaneously. The present study
attempted to fill these gaps by examining the effects of social capital on the psychosocial
adjustment of migrant children living in the urban cities of mainland China. Following
the ecological model (Bronfenbrenner, 1989), which views children and adolescents as
developing within a set of embedded social contexts or ecological systems including the
family, peer group, neighborhood, and institutions such as the school or the workplace,
this study incorporated all four dimension of social capital into one conceptual
framework, thus being able to simultaneously examine how each dimension of social
capital influenced the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children and how they differed
from each other in their strengths of effect. Furthermore, it investigated whether, as
suggested by some previous researchers, the effect of community social capital on the
psychosocial adjustment of migrant children was mediated by family social capital.
Considering that social interactions within the school and within peer groups often take
place in the community context as well, the study also investigated whether school social
capital and peer social capital played a similar role as family social capital in mediating
the effect of community social capital on the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children.

24
Figure 2.1 Hypothesized Model of Social Capital Effects on the Psychosocial Adjustment of Chinese Migrant Children

+
Community
Social Capital
+
+
+
+
+ +
+
+
+

Controls

-Sex
-Age
-Length of
Residence in
the City
-School Type
-Family
Structure
-Family
Human Capital
-Family
Financial
Capital
Family
Social Capital
Psychosocial
Adjustment
School
Social Capital
Peer
Social Capital

25
Figure 2.1 presents the conceptual framework of this study. Psychosocial adjustment,
assessed by self-esteem, depressive symptoms, hostility, and life satisfaction is the target
outcome, while social capital embedded in the family, school, peer groups, and
community are the major predictor variables. In addition to the social capital variables,
several socio-demographic variables were also included in the conceptual model,
including gender, age, length of residence in the city, school type (public school vs.
migrant children’s school), family structure (living with both parents vs. other family
arrangement), family human capital (i.e., parents’ cognitive skills and educational
attainment), and family financial capital (i.e., financial resources used for the household
and the child).

Methods
Participants and Procedure
Participants of the study were 815 4
th
– 9
th
grade migrant students from 14 schools
located in four administrative districts
*
of Shanghai, one of the largest metropolises in
China which hosts a majority of its migrant population. The study employed a school-
based multi-stage random sampling method. First, four administrative districts where
migrants were most concentrated were selected. Three of the four districts, Yangpu
District, Pudong District, and Fengxian District, provide education for migrant children in
both public schools and migrant children’s schools, while the fourth district, Xuhui
District, has closed all the migrant children’s schools and accommodated all migrant

*
The urban administrative system in China is composed of five levels: province, city, district, street, and
residential committee. The number of districts within a city and the geographic space and population size of
a district vary depending on the size of the city.

26
children in public schools. Second, a complete list of all public elementary and secondary
schools that accommodate both native and migrant students in each of the four districts,
as well as all migrant children’s schools in the first three districts, were obtained from the
Educational Bureau. In each district, one public elementary school and one public
secondary school was randomly selected from the list of public schools. Likewise, in
each of the first three districts, one elementary and one secondary school was randomly
selected from the migrant children’s schools. Therefore a total of eight public schools and
six migrant children’s schools were selected into study. Third, a complete list of migrant
students in the 4
th
–9
th
grades of the public elementary and secondary schools was
obtained from the school officials, and 60 migrant students were randomly selected from
each school. Similarly, 60 migrant students were randomly selected from each of the
migrant children’s schools, based on a complete list of 4
th
–9
th
grade students studying at
those schools. By doing so, a total of 840 migrant students from eight public schools and
six migrant children’s schools were recruited for the study. One parent of each selected
student, who considered himself/herself most knowledgeable of the student as well as
their family and neighborhood environment, was also invited to participate in the study.
Prior to the administration of surveys, students selected as potential participants were
provided with the child/adolescent assent forms and were asked to take home consent
forms to their parents. Students were eligible to participate in the study if they completed
the child/adolescent assent form and also their parents provided active written consent for
their participation. Students who met the eligibility criteria thus participating in the study
completed a paper-and-pencil survey in their classrooms during a single class period (45-
50 min) under the guidance of trained research assistants. The surveys were identified

27
only by a code number; students’ names or any other identifying information were not
required. The surveys were provided in Chinese, and the students were encouraged to ask
the research assistants to clarify the meaning of any question they felt difficult to
understand. Parents of the participating students completed a separate paper-and-pencil
survey brought back home by the students and returned to the research staff in sealed
envelops by the students.
Following the consent/assent procedure, 815 students eventually participated in the
study and completed the student survey, and 772 of their parents completed the parent
survey. Therefore the final sample used for analysis included 772 pairs of migrant student
and parent participants. Of the 772 migrant children and adolescents, 400 were male
(53.2%) and 352 were female (46.8%). The average age of the student participants was
12.87 (SD=1.932), with a range from 9 years to 18 years. More than half of the students
(58.5%, N=437) were studying at public schools, while the other 41.5 percent (N=310)
attended migrant children’s schools. A majority of the migrant children (86.2%) were
living with both parents in the household. The educational attainments of the migrant
children’s parents were mostly below the high school level, and the monthly incomes of
these families were mostly less than 3000 Yuan (about $438). Full descriptive statistics of
the sample characteristics were presented in Table 2.1.

28
Table 2.1 Descriptive Statistics of Sample Characteristics

Frequency (N) Percent (%)
Gender
Male 400 53.2
Female 352 46.8
Age Mean=12.87 (SD=1.932) (years)
Length of Residence in the City Mean=83.65 (SD=49.56) (months)
School Type
Public School 437 58.5
Migrant Children School 310 41.5
Family Structure
Living with both parents 652 86.2
Living with one or neither parent 104 13.8
Education (Father)
Didn’t attend or finish elementary school 84 11.3
Elementary school 177 23.8
Secondary school 350 47.0
High school (academic/professional/vocational) 117 15.7
Diploma 8 1.1
Bachelor or higher 8 1.1
Education (Mother)
Didn’t attend or finish elementary school 182 24.8
Elementary school 223 30.3
Secondary school 231 31.4
High school (academic/professional/vocational) 82 11.2
Diploma 7 1.0
Bachelor or higher 10 1.4
Employment Status (Father)
Full-time 391 51.8
Part-time 35 4.6
Unemployed 17 2.3
Self-owned business 312 41.3
Employment Status (Mother)
Full-time 346 45.8
Part-time 46 6.1
Unemployed 155 20.5
Self-owned business 209 27.6
Monthly Household Income
999 or less 68 9.1
1000-1999 238 31.9
2000-2999 191 25.6
3000-3999 94 12.6
4000-4999 45 6.0
5000-5999 43 5.8
6000-6999 16 2.1
7000 or above 52 7.0

29
Measures
Outcome Variable
Psychosocial Adjustment was assessed as a latent construct composed of four
related adjustment outcomes: 1) self-esteem, measured by the Rosenberg Self-Esteem
Scale (RSE) (Rosenberg, 1965), a 10 item instrument that has been used in research with
ethnically diverse samples including immigrant children, which shows good reliability
and validity (Rumbaut, 1994). Respondents were asked to describe the degree to which
the description about self in each item was true for them, such as “On the whole, I am
satisfied with myself” and “I feel that I have a number of good qualities”. Each item was
rated on a 4-point response scale ranging from “not true at all (1)” to “very true (4)”, with
higher scores indicating higher self-esteem. The Cronbach’s alpha of the RSE in this
sample was .671; 2) depression, measured by the Center for Epidemiological Studies
Depression Scale for Children (CES-DC) (Faulstich et al., 1986), a 20 item instrument
that assesses concurrent depressive symptoms and has been widely used in research
across various populations including immigrant children (Short & Johnston, 1997).
Respondents were asked to describe how much they experienced the symptom stated in
each item during the past week, such as “I was bothered by things that usually don’t
bother me”, “I felt sad”, and “I felt down and unhappy”. Each item was rated on a 4-point
response scale that included “Not at all”, “A little”, “Some”, and “A lot”, with higher
scores indicating more depressive symptoms. The Cronbach’s alpha of the CES-DC in
this sample was .827; 3) hostility, measured by the eight item subscale of hostility
adapted from the Aggression Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1992). Respondents were
asked to rate each item on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “extremely uncharacteristic

30
of me (1)” to “extremely characteristic of me (5)”, indicating how much the descriptions
of the feelings in the items were characteristic of themselves, such as “I am sometimes
eaten up with jealousy”, “I am suspicious of overly friendly strangers”, etc. The
Cronbach’s alpha of the hostility scale in this sample was .824; and 4) life satisfaction,
measured by the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, &
Griffin, 1985), a 5 item instrument with favorable psychometric properties that assesses
global life satisfaction. Participants rated on a 7-point response scale ranging from
“strongly disagree (1)” to “strongly agree (7)” to indicate how much they agreed with the
statement in each item, such as “I am satisfied with my life”, “In most ways, my life is
close to my ideal”. The Cronbach’s alpha of the SWLS in this sample was .832. In this
study, the standardized sum scores of the four scales, representing four distinct but
correlated adjustment outcomes, were used as observed indicators to form the latent
construct of psychosocial adjustment. The scores of depression and hostility were reverse
coded so that their direction of variation is consistent with that of self-esteem and life
satisfaction.

Social Capital Variables
A reliable and validated standardized measure that assesses various dimensions of
social capital with consistent and systematic indicators has yet to be developed. Measures
of social capital in this study drew upon existing indicators used by past studies,
supplemented by scales and questions that tapped into specific operationalizations of
social capital and were adapted to the particular Chinese social context. Family, school,

31
and peer social capital were assessed through children’s report, while community social
capital was assessed through parents’ report.
Family social capital was assessed by the quality of parent-child interaction and
parental monitoring. Parent-child interaction was measured by the Parent-Child
Relationship Inventory (Dixon, Fair, & Bernies, 2004), which assessed the behavioral,
affective and cognitive components of parent-child relationship from the child’s
perspective. The PCRI was composed of 40 items that captured the experience of
children in their relationship to parents in four areas: 1) eight items on their experience of
things that parents are supposed to do for children (e.g., “My parent pays attention to
me”); 2) nine items on their experience of things that children are supposed to do for
parents (e.g., “I do housework for my parent”); 3) eight items on their experience of
things that parents and children are supposed to do together (e.g., “My parent and I play
together”); and 4) 15 items on their experience of the feelings that parents and children
should have for each other and the way they behave with each other (e.g., “We trust each
other”). Participants rated each item on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “never (1)” to
“always (5)”, indicating how often these behaviors and feelings actually occur in their
relationship with parents. The Cronbach’s alpha of the PCRI in this study was .938, and
the Cronbach’s alpha of the four subscales were .749, .740, .756, and .927 respectively,
indicating good internal consistency of the entire scale and each of the subscales. Parental
monitoring was measured by two self-designed scales that incorporated the items used in
previous studies. One scale was composed of eight items asking about how often the
parent involved in their children’s school activities such as attending a school meeting or
talking with the teacher about their children’s school performance, as well as how often

32
the parent disciplined children at home such as limiting the time they watch TV or go out
with friends. Each item was rated on a 4-point scale ranging from “never (1)” to “often
(4)”. The Cronbach’s alpha of the scale in this study was .620. The other scale was
composed of four items examining the parent’s knowledge about their children’s after-
school activities, including where they are, who they are with, what they are doing, and
when they are returning home. Each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging
from “never (1)” to “always (5)”. The Cronbach’s alpha of the scale in this study
was .800. The standardized sum scores of the four subscales of the PCRI and the
standardized sum scores of the two parental monitoring scales were used as observed
indicators to form the latent construct of family social capital.
Peer social capital was assessed by the quality of peer relationships, which was
supposed to provide resources for the development of children and adolescents. The
Friendship Qualities Scale (Bukowski, Hoza, & Boivin, 1994) was employed to measure
peer relationships. The scale was composed of 23 items that represented five dimensions
of friendship: companionship (four items; e.g., “My friends and I spent all our free time
together”), conflict (four items; e.g., “I can get into fight with my friend”), help/aid (five
items; e.g., “my friend would help me if I needed it”), security (five items; e.g., “If I have
a problem at school or at home, I can talk to my friend about it”), and closeness (five
items; e.g., “I feel happy when I am with my friend”). Each item was rated on a 5-point
Likert scale that indicated the extent to which the description of the relationship with
friends in the item was true for the participant, ranging from “not true at all (1)” to “very
true (5)”. In this study, the Cronbach’s alpha of the FQS was .872, and the Cronbach’s
alpha of the five subscales were .779, .747, .753, .728, and .790 respectively, indicating

33
high internal consistency within each dimension. The standardized sum scores of these
five subscales were then used as observed indicators to form the latent construct of peer
social capital.
School social capital was assessed by school climate and the quality of student-
teacher relationships. School climate was measured by 10 items adapted from the
Inventory of School Climate-Student Version (ISC-S) that assessed multiple dimensions
of school climate, including consistency and clarity of rules, teacher support, student
commitment and achievement orientation, positive and negative peer interactions, and
safety (Brand et al., 2003). Participants rated each item on a 5-point scale ranging from
“not true at all (1)” to “very true (5)”, indicating how much the descriptions in the items
were characteristic of the actual situations of their schools. Sample items of the scale
included “Teachers go out of their way to help students”, “Students work hard for good
grades in classes” and “Students enjoy doing things with each other in school activities”.
The Cronbach’s alpha of the school climate scale in this study was .698. The other
dimension of school social capital, student-teacher relationships, was measured by a
seven item scale which was used to assess school social capital in Croninger and Lee’s
(2001) study. Participants rated each item on a 5-point scale ranging from “not true at all
(1)” to “very true (5)”, indicating how much the descriptions in the items were
characteristic of their experience in their relationships with the teacher. Sample items of
the scale included “The teachers are interested in me” and “The teachers recognize and
praise me when I work hard”. The Cronbach’s alpha of the student-teacher relationship
scale in this study was .857. The standardized sum scores of these two scales were used
as observed indicators to form the latent construct of school social capital

34
Community social capital was assessed by four dimensions that captured the
neighborhood characteristics through the responses of parents: social cohesion and trust
in adults (SC & T-A), informal social control (ISC), social cohesion and trust in children
(SC & T-C), and solidarity of the neighborhood. The SC & T-A was measured using a
five item collective efficacy scale developed by Sampson and colleagues (1997), which
examined the bonds and trust among adult residents of the neighborhood. Participants
were asked to describe how much the descriptions in the items were characteristic of the
neighborhood they lived in, such as “People in this neighborhood help each other out”
and “This is a close-knit neighborhood”. Each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale
ranging from “extremely uncharacteristic (1)” to “extremely characteristic (5)”. The
Cronbach’s alpha of the SC & T-A scale in this sample was .631. Since the study focused
on children, a separate seven item SC &T-C scale was used particularly to assess the
bonds and trust among children in the neighborhood, which include items like “Children
in this neighborhood are close-knit”, “Children in this neighborhood play together a lot”,
etc. Questions of this scale had been used previously in a Dutch study on social capital
and children’s health-related quality of life (Drukker, Kaplan, Feron, & Os, 2003).
Similar to the SC & T-A scale, each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale, and the
Cronbach’s alpha of the SC & T-C scale in this sample was .635. Informal social control
was measured by a five item scale that examined the ability and willingness of adult
neighbors to provide monitoring and social control for children living in the
neighborhood. Development of the scale referred to the collective efficacy scale
developed by Sampson and colleagues (1997) and was adapted to the particular Chinese
context. Sample items include “There are a lot of adults around here that my children

35
could look up to” and “We watch out for each other’s children in this neighborhood”.
Each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale, and the Cronbach’s alpha of the ISC scale
in this sample was .769. Solidarity of the neighborhood was measured by two questions
asking the participants to describe how strong was their feeling of togetherness with
neighbors and how strong was their sense of belonging to the neighborhood. Each
question was responded to on a 5-point scale ranging from “very weak (1)” to “very
strong (5)”, with higher scores indicating stronger solidarity of the neighborhood. In data
analysis of this study, the standardized sum scores of the social cohesion and trust scales
and the informal social control scale, as well as the standardized score of the two
solidarity items, were used as five observed indicators to form the latent construct of
community social capital.

Socio-demographic Variables
The socio-demographic variables included in the test of hypothesized models
included gender, age, length of residence in the city, school type, family structure, family
human capital, and family financial capital. Gender (1=female, 0=male), age (in years),
and school type (1=public school, 0=migrant children’s school) were self-explanatory.
Length of residence was measured by the number of months that the children have lived
in the city. Family structure was examined by a binary variable (1=children living with
both parents, 0=other family arrangement); it was included given the assumption that the
physical presence of both parents would influence the parental involvement in the
children (Coleman, 1988). Family human capital was assessed by parents’ educational
attainments, which were expected to influence the cognitive environment within a home

36
(Coleman, 1988). In this study, father and mother’s educational levels were reported by
children on seven categories ranging from “didn’t go to or didn’t graduate from
elementary school (1)” to “university graduate or higher (7)”. This is a common
operationalization of human capital in prior empirical studies (Coleman & Hoffer, 1987;
Teachman et al., 1996, 1997). Family financial capital was assessed by three indicators:
monthly household income, household equipment, and poverty index. Monthly household
income, referring to income from all sources in the household, was reported by parents on
12 categories ranging from “lower than RMB 100 Yuan (1)” (about $12.5) to “More than
RMB 10000 Yuan (12)” (about $1,250). Household equipment was measured by asking
parents to indicate whether their family has electronic items such as refrigerator, washing
machine, air conditioning, and a computer. The number of electronics that the family
possesses was representative of the family’s economic condition. The response to each
item was dummy coded and the sum of responses to all items (ranging from 0 to 10)
composed the household equipment score. The poverty index included three questions
asking the parents how difficult it had been in the past year to purchase furniture or
household equipment that needed to be replaced, to buy food their children should have,
and obtain medical care for their children. Participants rated each question on a 5-point
scale ranging from “very difficult (1)” to “not difficult at all (5)”, with higher scores
indicating a lower poverty level. The standardized scores of the monthly household
income, the household equipment, and the poverty index were used as three observed
indicators to form the latent construct of family financial capital. Please refer to
Appendix I for a complete list of latent constructs in the study and corresponding
measures of observed variables for each.

37
Data Analysis
Structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted using Mplus 5.0 (Muthén &
Muthén , 2007) to test the hypothesized models. SEM permits the use of latent constructs
composed of multiple observed variables and allows for estimating the relationships
among latent constructs while providing explicit estimates of measurement errors to
increase the accuracy of analysis results (Byrne, 2001). Moreover, it permits the
simultaneous estimation of direct and indirect paths, estimating each path after the effects
of all other paths are accounted for. These features render SEM an especially well-suited
technique for this study, given the hypothesized direct and mediating effects of latent
contextual variables on the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children. The study
followed the two-step approach to SEM (Kline, 2005), testing the measurement model at
the first step to establish a statistically reliable measure for each latent construct, and then
testing the structural model at the second step to examine the multivariate relationships
among latent constructs. The study did not perform any particular analysis for missing
data because no one study variable had more than 5% missing data. Considering the
adequate sample size, the small percent of missing data did not seriously distort analysis
results.

Results
Test of Measurement Model
The measurement model of the seven latent constructs (i.e., family social capital,
school social capital, peer social capital, community social capital, family human capital,
family financial capital, and the psychosocial adjustment) was examined before going

38
further to test the hypothesized structural model. Multiple fit indices were used to assess
the goodness of the model, including: 1) Chi Square ( 
2
), the likelihood ratio test statistic,
where an associated probability value showing non-significant 
2
represents a closer fit of
the hypothesized model to the perfect fit (Bollen, 1989). However, due to the sensitivity
of the likelihood ratio test to sample size, it is not uncommon for a well-fitting
hypothesized model to yield a significant 
2
if the sample size is large (Byrne, 2001); 2)
the Comparative Fit Index (CFI), which compares the performance of the specified model
to the performance of a baseline independence model, where values above 0.90 denote a
good model fit (Bentler, 1990); and 3) the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation
(RMSEA; Steiger, 1990), where values less than 0.05 indicate a “close fit”, values
between 0.05 and 0.08 suggest a “reasonable fit”, and values above 0.1 denote a “poor
fit” (Kline, 2005).
As indicated by the analysis result, the measurement model provided a good fit to the
data ( 
2
= 526.184, df = 276, p<.001, CFI = 0.959, RMSEA = .034) with CFI greater
than .90 and RMSEA smaller than .05. All observed variables were significantly loaded
on the corresponding latent constructs in the expected directions, suggesting that the
selected indicators reasonably represented the underlying constructs in a statistically
reliable manner. The standardized factor loadings of indicators for each latent construct
in the measurement model were presented in Table 2.2. They were all greater than the
commonly adopted criteria of acceptable loadings (i.e., .30) for keeping certain indicators
(Agnew, 1991). The measurement model also examined the correlations among the
theoretical constructs and found them all significantly related.

39
Table 2.2 Standardized Factor Loadings of Observed Variables on
Latent Constructs

Family Social Capital Peer Social Capital Community Social Capital
V11 .732 V19 .637 V24 .706
V12 .779 V20 .685 V25 .664
V13 .778 V21 .720 V26 .624
V14 .846 V22 .688 V27 .536
V15 .494 V23 .798 V28 .512
V16 .512
School Social Capital Family Financial Capital Psychosocial Adjustment
V17 .683 V8 .804 V29 .657
V18 .833 V9 .638 V30 .604
Family Human Capital V10 .626 V31 .397
V6 .690 V32 .620
V7 .812

V1: sex; V2: age; V3: length of residence; V4: family structure; V5: school type; V6: father’s
education; V7: mother’s education; V8: monthly household income; V9: household equipment;
V10: poverty index; V11: things that parents do for children; V12: things that children do for
parents; V13: things that parents and children do together; V14: feelings that parents and children
have for each other and the way they behave with each other; V15: parental monitoring of
children’s school activities and home discipline; V16: parents’ knowledge of children’s
afterschool activities; V17: school climate; V18: student-teacher relationships; V19:
companionship; V20: conflict; V21: help/aid; V22: security; V23: closeness; V24: social
cohesion and trust in adults; V25: social cohesion and trust in children; V26: informal social
control; V27: feeling of togetherness with neighbors; V28: sense of belong to the neighborhood;
V29: self-esteem; V30: depression; V31: hostility; V32: life satisfaction

Test of Structural Model
A test of the hypothesized structural model showed that it provided a good fit to the
data. Although the Chi-Square value (701.748, df = 377) was large and significant,
mainly because of its sensitivity to large sample size, other goodness-of-fit indices
demonstrated satisfying results: CFI (.950) was above .90, and RMSEA (.033) was lower
than .05. A total of 63.1 percent of the variance in the psychosocial adjustment of migrant
children was explained by this model.

40
Figure 2.2 Standardized Solutions for the Structural Model of Social Capital Effects on the Psychosocial Adjustment of
Chinese Migrant Children
Community
Social Capital
Family
Social Capital
School
Social Capital
Peer
Social Capital
Psychosocial
Adjustment
.344***
.310***
.200**
.150**
.286***
.156**
.509***
.535***
.400**

* p<.05; ** p<.01; *** p<.001

41
The standardized solution for the test of the structural model is presented in Figure
2.2. For the sake of parsimony, only significant paths of major predictor variables are
displayed. As hypothesized, family social capital had a significant direct effect on the
psychosocial adjustment of migrant children ( β = .310, p <.001), with higher levels of
family social capital predicting better adjustment outcomes. School social capital ( β
= .344, p <.001) and peer social capital ( β = .200, p <.01) showed similar positive effects
on children’s adjustment as well. Community social capital did not show significant
direct effect on the psychosocial adjustment ( β = .092, NS). However, higher levels of
community social capital were significantly associated with higher levels of family social
capital ( β = .150, p <.01), school social capital ( β = .286, p <.001), and peer social capital
( β = .156, p <.01), which, in turn, predicted better psychosocial adjustment of migrant
children. In other words, the effect of community social capital was mediated by the
effects of family, school, and peer social capital.
Four criteria that have been suggested to test the significance of mediation effects
(Baron & Kenny, 1986; Holmbeck, 1997; MacKinnon, Lockwood, Hoffman, West, &
Sheets, 2002) were used to evaluate the three mediating pathways linking community
social capital to children’s psychosocial adjustment through family, school, and peer
social capital. First, the path from the independent variable to the mediator ( α) must be
significant. Second, the path from the mediator to the dependent variable ( β) must be
significant while the independent variable is controlled. Third, the total effect of the
independent variable on the dependent variable ( must be significant. Fourth, the
mediation effect, calculated as the product of the two regression coefficients indicated in
the first and the second criteria ( α*β), must be significant using the procedure outlined by

42
Sobel (1987). Note that α, β, and  all refer to unstandardized regression coefficients.
Results of the study showed that community social capital had a significant effect on
family social capital ( α = .153, p <.01) and family social capital had a significant effect
on psychosocial adjustment ( β = .283, p <.001) while community social capital was
controlled for. Community social capital also had a significant total effect on
psychosocial adjustment when the mediators were not included in the model ( = .248, p
<.001). The mediation effect was significant as well according to the Sobel test result
( α*β = -.043, p <.01). Furthermore, the direct effect of community social capital on the
psychosocial adjustment was not significant any more once family social capital was
included in the model (.085, NS). Taken together, these results indicated that family
social capital did mediate the effect of community social capital on the psychosocial
adjustment of migrant children. Applying the same procedure, the mediation effects
denoting the influences of community social capital on the child’s adjustment through its
effects on school and peer social capital were demonstrated to be significant as well.
Of the socio-demographic variables, higher levels of family human capital ( β = .153,
p <.01) and family financial capital ( β = .156, p <.01) were both significantly associated
with higher levels of family social capital, thus influencing children’s psychosocial
adjustment indirectly through the mediating effect of family social capital. Social capital
also mediated the effects of gender, age, and school type. Being male was associated with
increased family social capital ( β = .112, p <.01), school social capital ( β = .096, p <.05),
and peer social capital ( β = .152, p <.001), which led to better adjustment outcomes. Age
was negatively associated with family social capital ( β = -.097, p <.01) and school social
capital ( β = -.240, p <.001), indicating that younger children experienced better

43
psychosocial adjustment because of higher levels of accessible family and school social
capital. Furthermore, attending public schools instead of migrant children’s schools was
associated with higher levels of family social capital ( β = .233, p <.001), school social
capital ( β = .284, p <.001), and peer social capital ( β = .249, p <.001), thus resulting in
children’s better adjustment. Applying the same procedure of mediation effect test as
explained above in the evaluation of community social capital effect, these mediating
pathways showing the influences of socio-demographic variables on the child’s
adjustment through various dimensions of social capital were all demonstrated to be
significant. Lastly, children’s psychosocial adjustment was also influenced by their length
of residence in the city ( β = .084, p <.05). The longer they had lived in the city, the better
adjustment they had experienced.
In summary, results of the study showed that family, school, and peer social capital
all influenced the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children significantly and
positively; these three dimensions of social capital also mediated the effect of community
social capital on children’s adjustment. The standardized total effects of family, school,
peer, and community social capital on the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children
were .310, .344, .200, and .268 respectively. Gender and age of migrant children, family
human and financial capital, and the type of school they attend influenced their
psychosocial adjustment indirectly through the mediating effects of family, school, and
peer social capital, while the children’s length of residence in the city had a direct impact
on their adjustment. The standardized direct, indirect, and total effects of major predictor
variables were presented in Table 2.3.

44
Table 2.3 Standardized Direct, Indirect, and Total Effects of Major Predictor
Variables on Children’s Psychosocial Adjustment

Major Predictor Variables Psychosocial Adjustment
Direct Indirect Total
Family Social Capital .310 - .310
School Social Capital .344 - .344
Peer Social Capital .200 - .200
Community Social Capital .092 .176 .268
Family Human Capital .036 .048 .084
Family Financial Capital -.027 .048 .021
Gender .017 .098 .115
Age .000 -.112 -.112
School Type .039 .220 .259

Discussion
The present study was an initial effort to apply social capital theory to understand the
psychosocial adjustment of migrant children in mainland China. It employed an
ecological perspective to incorporate social capital embedded in a range of the children’s
immediate social contexts, thus being able to examine the mechanism by which multiple
dimensions of social capital function on children’s adjustment as they exist
simultaneously. The study results provide strong support for the proposition that social
capital plays a significant role in promoting psychosocial adjustment of migrant children.
This study provides a meaningful replication of findings in other populations with
regard to the significant effects of family social capital on youth development. It supports
Coleman’s (1988) assertion that family social capital plays a significant role in the
adjustment and well-being of children and adolescents (Hao & Bonstead-Bruns, 1998;
McNeal, 1999; Parcel & Dufur, 2001; Parcel & Menaghan, 1993; Valenzuela &
Dornbusch, 1994; White & Glick, 2000). In this particular sample of migrant children in
mainland China, positive parent-child interactions reflected by the extent that parents and

45
children do things for each other and together, by the feeling of closeness and warmth
they have for each other, and by the way they behave with each other, is significantly
associated with children’s healthier psychosocial adjustment characterized by higher
level of self-esteem, less depressive symptoms, less feelings of hostility, and higher
levels of life satisfaction. More careful and conscious monitoring of parents on children’s
activities at home, at school, and during afterschool time, which is indicative of parents’
interest in what and how things are going on in their children’s life, also adds to the effect
of family social capital on children’s psychosocial adjustment. Moreover, the role of
family social capital in completely mediating the effects of family human capital and
family financial capital on the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant children
provides empirical support for Coleman’s contention that, parents’ educational or
financial advantages cannot be automatically transmitted to children without appropriate
parent-child interactions (Coleman, 1988; Parcel & Dufur, 2001). It echoes previous
research evidence that parents with more educational and financial resources are able to
mobilize greater social capital in the family sphere (Coleman & Hoffer, 1987;
Furstenberg & Hughes, 1995; Putnam, 2000; Teachman et al., 1996, 1997), which, in turn,
leads to healthier development of children.
The study findings also recognize the significance of school social capital, which has
exhibited a stronger effect on the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children over the
other dimensions of social capital. Although previous studies have demonstrated the
association between school social capital and academic performances of children and
adolescents (Croniger & Lee, 2001; Crosnoe, 2004; Parcel & Dufur, 2001), this study
focuses on the psychosocial consequences of school social capital for migrant children in

46
the Chinese social context. Considering the fact that school is the dominant extrafamilial
institution in the early life course (Schneider & Coleman, 1993) where children and
youths spend a great part of their time, it is not surprising to find that social resources
inherent in the school context exert the strongest impact on children’s psychosocial
adjustment. This result is consistent with the argument of recent studies that suggest that
school sits in the center of a child’s ecological system and is expected to constitute the
most influential predictor of the child’s development compared to other social contexts
(Benbenishty & Astor, 2005). Peer social capital presents a significant, but relatively
weaker effect on children’s psychosocial adjustment in the study. The less influential
impact of peer social capital might result from the particular characteristics of this
population of migrant children. They come to the city with a clear expectation of upward
mobility, enhanced family living conditions and achieving academic success at school.
Their emotional and social functioning thus largely depends on how much they feel their
expectations fulfilled in those two crucial social contexts. Given that resources inherent
in the relationships at home and at school will contribute more to their sense of
fulfillment in adapting to the urban environment, it is conceivable that family and school
social capital exhibits a stronger effect than peer social capital.
A most interesting extension of this study to prior research findings is the significant
mediating effects of family, school, and peer social capital that link community social
capital to the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children. It has long been recognized
that neighborhood serves as an important context for the development of family processes
and adolescent mental health (Hughes et al., 1998), but the results of this study clearly
delineate how community resources influences children’s adjustment. Social capital

47
essentially refers to resources that flow through relationship ties and enhance individual
functioning (Bourdieu, 1986; Coleman, 1988; Sampson, Morenoff, & Earls, 1999).
Although not showing a significant direct effect, the mediating effects involved in the
function of community social capital explain how the bonds among resident adults and
children and the resources made available to people living in the neighborhood through
those bonds potentially generate benefits to children and adolescents. As the results
suggest, the trust, cohesion, and social control in the neighborhood would be carried on to
the family, school, and peer contexts, thus leading to positive child adjustment. In
neighborhoods where people trust and help one another, and are willing to watch and
supervise the activities of each other’s children, parents tend to invest more time and
attention in interacting with their own children and monitoring their activities. As
suggested by a study of social capital and the depression in Chinese adolescents (Wu,
forthcoming), this may happen because interactions at the neighborhood level provide
social support and positive role models for parents to follow in their child-rearing
practice and encourage them to be better engaged in parent-child relationships. Likewise,
the collective efficacy of the neighborhood would extend to the school setting and create
a favorable school environment, where teachers feel more obligated to care for children
when neighborhood adults generally care about the lives of young people. A watchful and
caring neighborhood may also free teachers from extra concerns of safety or delinquency
issues, thus saving them more time and energy to be closer to and take better care of the
students. In neighborhoods where there are safe places for children to play together and
where their activities are carefully supervised by adults to make sure they do not go
astray, children are more likely to build high quality peer relationships as well. As such, it

48
is the increase in the stock of family, school, and peer social capital that results from
higher levels of community social capital that leads to healthier psychosocial adjustment
of migrant children. This seems especially the case for migrant children living in the
urban settings of mainland China. They may not spend much time interacting with
neighbors because of their marginalized status and lower residential stability due to
frequent moving, thus being less likely to benefit directly from available social capital
within their neighborhoods. However, the atmosphere of the entire neighborhood would
foster the growth and flow of resources through relationship ties in other social contexts,
which eventually confers benefits on children’s development. Consistent with the
observed centrality of school in the child’s ecological system, the results also
demonstrate that the most influential effect of community social capital lies in promoting
healthier school climate and student-teacher relationships that constitute school social
capital. The indirect effect of community social capital on the psychosocial adjustment of
migrant children through school social capital accounted for 56 percent of its total
indirect effect.
The significant effects of gender and school type on children’s adjustment merit
special attention as well. Being male and attending public schools appear to be associated
with higher levels of family, school, and peer social capital, which lead to better
psychosocial adjustment. Presumably, the gender effect is rooted in the Chinese culture
wherein boys are favored more than girls. The preference for sons in Chinese families has
been well documented, and the son preference leads to significant gender bias in the care
received by children (Short, Zhai, Xu, & Yang, 2001). This is supported by results of the
study that higher levels of family social capital are associated with male gender. Boys

49
may also enjoy more freedom in spending their spare time, which gives them more
opportunities to be together with friends after school and enables them to build stronger
peer relationships. In addition, parents of boys may communicate with teachers more
often regarding the child’s school performance, which potentially enhances the care
teachers provide to boys, thus facilitating the increase of school social capital. In short,
the gender bias inherent in the Chinese culture results in higher levels of social capital to
which boys have access. The significant effect of school type is also anticipated, given
the known lower quality of migrant children’s schools compared to public schools.
Public schools provide students with more favorable school climate and with better
qualified teachers who are more willing and able to care for the students. Children who
attend public schools may also come from families with higher parents’ educational
attainments, better financial situations, and stronger family norms in children’s
achievement, all of which contribute to increased family social capital. Nevertheless, the
reason why attending public schools facilitates better peer relationships remains unclear
and needs further exploration.
Overall, the study findings largely support the hypothesized model and contribute to
our understanding of the mechanism by which social capital embedded in a range of
social contexts influence the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant children.
Nevertheless, the results should be interpreted in light of several limitations of the study.
First, with a cross-sectional study design, the study could not rigorously establish causal
relationships between social capital and the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children.
There remains the possibility that better psychosocial adjustment of migrant children
results in higher levels of social capital, rather than vice versa. Second, participants of the

50
study are selected from elementary and junior high school students. This excludes
migrant children not currently enrolled in school. As a matter of fact, there is a large
population of migrant children who could not attend school in the city due to structural
barriers or financial hardship. Therefore, the sample selection criteria employed in this
study restricts the generalizability of research findings to the entire population of migrant
children. Third, the study does not include a comparison group to migrant children in
assessing their social capital and psychosocial adjustment, for example, native urban
children living in the city. Conceivably, a comparison between migrant children and their
native urban counterparts will yield more meaningful insights into the disparities as well
as pathways to disparities in children’s psychosocial adjustment.

Implications for Theory, Practice, Policy, and Future Research
Despite the limitations noted above, the current study has multiple implications for
the advancement of theory and for the design and delivery of social service programs and
social policy. It also points out promising directions for future research. First, the study
advances the theory of social capital by unraveling the mechanism by which family,
school, peer, and community social capital influence the psychosocial adjustment of
migrant children through both direct and mediating pathways. Weaving the ecological
perspective into social capital theory would increase its comprehensiveness and power in
understanding the development of children and adolescents as a function of social factors.
Testing the theory in a nonwestern context also potentially fortifies its cross-cultural
validity and applicability.

51
Second, the significant effects of family, school, and peer social capital on children’s
psychosocial adjustment, as well as the role each plays in mediating the effect of
community social capital, have important implications for the development of social
service programs. In the literature of social development, asset building has been a well-
acknowledged and widely-applied model in promoting the well-being of children and
adolescents in poverty and other adverse conditions (Sherraden, 2005). The results of this
research suggest utilizing social capital building as an innovative approach that provides
a potential alternative or supplement to the asset-based model for the adjustment and
well-being of vulnerable children. Although the asset building approach involves “hard”
investments in monetary or material resources in the form of saving accounts that yield
positive effects in economic, personal, familial, communal, and political terms for people
in poverty including children, the social capital building model emphasizes a “soft”
investment in social relationships that generate and mobilize resources for the benefits of
people in adverse circumstances. The promise of the social capital building model lies in
the fact that, even in situations when little or no wealth is available for an individual to
accumulate assets, there remains a feasible means by which people could generate
potential resources to promote the development of children and adolescents, simply
through forging stronger ties in their social contexts. Given the significant effects of
family, school and peer social capital on the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children
in this study, a great deal of efforts of social service professionals should be devoted to
facilitating the development of social capital in these domains. Specifically, in the family
context, the finding that family social capital is strongly associated with children’s
psychosocial adjustment provides parents with a very direct and manageable strategy for

52
improving their child’s well-being: making themselves available to children. However,
this can be challenging, particularly in low-income families in which both parents are
working, only one parent is present, one parent is working on multiple jobs, or parents
have to put in long hours to support the family economically (Ackerman, D’Eramo,
Umylny, Schultz, & Izard, 2001; Fitzpatrick, Piko, Wright, & LaGory, 2005), which is
usually the case for the Chinese migrant families. Therefore, social work professionals
should consider designing effective family service programs that either educate parents to
devote more time and attention to their children, or cultivate their skills to improve the
quality of time they spend with children if it has to be limited. Similarly, in the school
context, efforts are expected to be made to encourage positive interactions between
students and teachers and to foster teachers’ increased care for students. Considering that
school social capital presents the strongest effect on children’s psychosocial adjustment,
and that the effect of community social capital is largely mediated by school social
capital, strengthening school social capital merits close attention in practice and has the
potential to serve as a most effective component of the intervention programs. In other
words, it is of central importance to recognize the role of school in service programs
since it is critical in promoting children’s adjustment itself and in conferring community
resources onto children. Peer social capital is more self-driven and may require less
assistance by social service programs. Nevertheless, it is still important for service
professionals to enhance the self-efficacy and social skills of migrant children and
facilitate their peer relationship building, because migrant children often experience a
feeling of discrimination in the urban environment, which deters them from making
friends. It is also important to foster a receptive attitude in the native urban children so as

53
to ease the efforts of peer relationship building for migrant children. Lastly, at the
community level, the study suggests that service programs develop effective strategies to
strengthen social capital in the neighborhood, given that the increase of community social
capital will result in the increase of other dimensions of social capital, which lead to
healthier adjustment of migrant children. Resident adults may not initiate interactions or
invest much time and efforts in collective affairs, but community service programs could
build public facilities, create opportunities for residents to meet and interact, encourage
the exchange of information and opinions, foster the culture of mutual support, all of
which provide an impetus for the development of social capital (Brown & Richman,
1997). As their interactions increase, the level of social cohesion, trust, and the
willingness to improve the neighborhood and to take care of child and adolescent
residents would increase as well. On the other hand, the complete mediation of
community social capital effects by other dimensions of social capital also implies that,
the lack of sufficient community social capital would not necessarily lead to poorer
psychosocial adjustment of migrant children, if other dimensions of social capital are
present in sufficient quantities. In other words, social capital embedded in the family,
school, and peer groups may potentially compensate for the lack of social capital in the
neighborhood. Overall, this innovative approach of social capital building conveys a
promising message for social work practice that, even in situations when the material
resources available for children are not likely to grow, children may remain resilient and
fare better socially and emotionally if they have access to adequate social resources
inherent in multiple social relationships, which are always feasible to be invested.

54
Therefore, facilitating the development of social capital is expected to be an effective
strategy in practice.
Third, this study raises awareness among policymakers of the importance of taking
active measures at the structural level to promote the adjustment and well-being of
migrant children. It calls on social policy to distribute more resources to research on the
psychosocial issues of migrant children, building relevant scientific knowledge that could
be translated into effective interventions. It also advocates public policies designed to
empower the family and to improve the school and community environment, thus
facilitating the development of social capital for the healthier adjustment of migrant
children. For instance, assistance programs for low-income migrant families will provide
parents with needed resources that reduce their financial stresses, shorten their working
hours, and enable them to invest more time and attention on their children, thus
increasing the stock of family social capital. Considering that school social capital has
extremely strong effects on the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children, and that the
type of school makes a big difference in the levels of school social capital, government
officials may also implement policies to either accommodate all migrant children into
public schools or providing resources to improve the quality of migrant children’s
schools, thus increasing the stock of school social capital. In addition, it should be the
responsibility of the government to maintain the safety and to improve the neighborhood
environment as a means to facilitate the interactions of resident adults and children,
building trust and social cohesion, thus fostering the growth of community social capital,
which, as suggested by the study, leads to better psychosocial adjustment of migrant
children.

55
Finally, this study also points out several promising directions for future research.
First, social capital is not a static resource but continuously evolving as relationships
develop. Migrant children in particular may experience substantial change in multiple
dimensions of social capital as a consequence of their migration from rural to urban areas.
Further research should consider using a longitudinal design to track the changes of
social capital and model the effect of the changes on the psychosocial adjustment of
migrant children. It will be especially beneficial if pre- and post-migration measures of
social capital can be both examined. Statistically, the longitudinal design will also help
establish the causal relationships between social capital and psychosocial adjustment.
Second, a comparison of the social capital effects between migrant children and
adolescents living in the urban cities and other groups in the context of migration may
yield fuller understanding of their adaptation. Future research may consider using a
comparative design to examine the adjustment and well-being of the urban-dwelling
migrant children and adolescents as compared to those who are left behind in the rural
areas by their migrant parents, and those who return to the rural areas after living in the
urban areas for a certain period of time. The latter two populations are susceptible to
extreme vulnerability no less than that of their counterparts in the cities, but are paid even
less attention by research and policy to date. A comparison between migrant children and
adolescents and their native urban counterparts will also produce important knowledge of
the disparity in adjustment and the distinctive functioning of social capital within these
two populations. Third, the theoretical framework of social capital developed in the
present study should be applied to other populations, developmental outcomes, and socio-
cultural contexts, so as to fortify its universal validity and applicability. A further step in

56
this line of inquiry would be developing cross-cultural studies that explore how culture
shapes the mechanism by which multiple dimensions of social capital function on various
development outcomes of children and adolescents in various adverse conditions.

Conclusion
This study tests a comprehensive model delineating the effects of family, school,
peer, and community social capital on the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant
children. The fact that the model explains 63 percent of the variance in the psychosocial
adjustment provides convincing evidence of the importance of social capital as a
protective factor for the positive development of migrant children against high adversity.
Based on the knowledge of social capital effects, this study proposes a social capital
building model as a potential alternative and/or supplement to the widely-applied asset
building model. The study indicates the great potential of social capital building model in
expanding our current strategies in social policy and social service programs for the
healthier adjustment of migrant children. It also has the potential of extended application
in the positive development of children and adolescents from other vulnerable
populations and/or in other socio-cultural contexts. Further empirical studies on the
effects of social capital on a broader range of outcomes among a broader range of
populations are expected to continue building scientific knowledge that will translate into
evidence-based practices and policies.

57
Chapter 3 Social Capital in Promoting the Psychosocial Adjustment of Chinese
Migrant Children: Interaction across Contexts

Introduction
Social capital has been an increasingly popular construct in examining the social
determinants of health and well-being (Kawachi, 2008; O’Brien, Burdsal, & Molgaard,
2004; Portes, 1998; Putnam, 2000). A large body of literature has demonstrated the
significant role of social capital in the development of children and adolescents, including
their psychosocial adjustment (Coleman, 1988, 1990; Dorsey & Forehand, 2003; Hao &
Bonstead-Bruns, 1998; Morrow, 1999; Portes, 1998; Sun, 1999; Zhou & Bankston, 1994).
Recent studies are moving forward to incorporate social capital embedded in various
social contexts (e.g., family, school, neighborhood) into one integrative framework in
order to examine and distinguish the effects of each dimension of social capital as they
exist simultaneously (Day & Wen, 2007; Wu, forthcoming). However, the conditional
nature of the social capital effects has yet to be explored. In line with the growing
consensus that a more complete understanding of youth development requires taking into
account the full range of social contexts that shape the developmental processes as
interrelated rather than in isolation (Bronfenbrenner, 1989; Rankin & Quane, 2002), it is
not unreasonable to conceive that the operation of one dimension of social capital might
vary according to the stock of another dimension. Therefore, to fully understand the
mechanism by which multiple dimensions of social capital function on the adjustment
and well-being of children and adolescents, it is important to investigate whether and how

58
social capital inherent in one social domain works in a particular way contingent on the
existence and function of social capital embedded in another social context.
The present study examined how social capital embedded in a range of social
contexts, namely, family, school, peer groups, and community, interact with each other to
influence the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children in mainland China.
Specifically, considering that community provides a larger context where family
processes, school functions, and peer interactions take place, the major research question
addressed in this study is whether the level of community social capital moderates the
effects of family, school, and peer social capital on the psychosocial adjustment of
migrant children in mainland China. Findings of this study are expected to build up our
knowledge about in which spheres, and under what conditions, social capital will
generate the greatest benefits for the psychosocial adjustment of this population.

Psychosocial Adjustment of Migrant Children in Mainland China
The internal migration of mainland China is characterized by a population flow from
rural to urban areas in search of better living conditions. In recent years, increasing
numbers of children have migrated to cities with their parents. According to the 2000
census, there were a total of 121,070,000 migrants in China (National Bureau of Statistics,
2000). Of these, 19.37 percent were children under age 18 (National Working Committee
on Children and Women, 2003). In the city of Shanghai, one of China’s largest
metropolises that host a majority of its migrant population, the population of migrants
was even more striking. By the end of the year 2000, there were 3.87 million migrants in
Shanghai, of which 320,000 were school-age children (Li, 2004). The number of

59
migrants increased to 4.98 million by August 1, 2003, and amounted to 5.81 million by
the end of 2005, of which 4.38 million had lived in Shanghai for more than half a year,
accounting for 24.6 percent of the city’s population (China Business News, 2007). In
three of the 19 districts of Shanghai, the population size of migrants has exceeded that of
the native urban residents. It is anticipated that by 2010, one third of Shanghai’s
population will be composed of migrants (China Business News, 2007).
The continuously growing population of migrant children has evoked increasing
attention from the government and society at large. However, under China’s household
registration system (hukou), which is usually assigned at birth and has been designed to
control rural-urban mobility for economic and political purposes, migrant children are not
granted equal access to education, medical care, and many other social services, due to
urban residence requirements. Traditionally the local government where a child’s hukou
is registered is solely responsible for providing her/him with an education. Large
numbers of migrant children are thus denied entry into public schools in the city and are
forced to enroll in the so-called “migrant children’s schools”, which are of significantly
lower quality in terms of facilities and human resources. Recent policies have sought to
address this problem and the government requires public schools to accommodate
migrant children. Nevertheless, the delay in policy implementation perpetuates a harsh
situation. This pattern of exclusion also extends into other areas of children’s lives, such
as limited access to medical care and living in the marginal areas of cities known as
“urban villages”. Presumably, the structural barriers of segregation and discrimination
pose many threats to the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children as they are faced
with numerous obstacles to successful adaptation to the new urban environments. These

60
adjustment problems may undermine their future development in a variety of areas and
cause other problems with potentially high social costs. Nevertheless, migrant children
are a newly emerging population despite their large numbers and largely understudied.
Although issues of their education have been addressed in previous research (Han, 2001),
little has been done to understand patterns and processes of their psychosocial adjustment.
Research in western societies has demonstrated that immigrant children are at higher
risk of developing adjustment problems either as a direct result of immigration stress or
indirectly through parental distress and disrupted family context (Short & Johnston,
1997). They face a number of challenges that include adapting to a new school and social
environment, segregation, prejudice, marginalization, and changes in family ecologies
(Baptiste, 1993; Chan, Ip, & Yuen, 1996; Chiu et al., 1992). In an overview of existing
research on immigrant children, problems related to their adjustment include low self-
esteem, depression, anxiety, stress, hostility, aggression, poor life satisfaction, and
deviant behaviors (Bankston & Zhou, 2002a; Baptiste, 1993; Jaycox et al., 2002; Padilla
& Duran, 1995; Rumbaut, 1994). Of the limited number of Chinese studies that looked at
the psychological wellbeing of migrant children, Li and colleague’s (2008) study on 1018
migrant children and 319 native urban children in Beijing found that levels of self-esteem
of migrant children were significantly lower than that of urban children, and levels of
self-esteem of migrant children attending migrant children’s schools were significantly
lower than that of migrant children attending public school. Nevertheless, to date there is
a dearth of knowledge about how social and environmental factors influence the
psychosocial adjustment of migrant children. A comprehensive examination of the social
determinants, as well as the mechanism by which they function on the psychosocial

61
adjustment of migrant children is critical for understanding the experience of this
vulnerable population and for developing effective policies and service programs to
promote their well-being.

Effects of Social Capital on the Development of Children and Adolescents
Following the seminal work of Coleman (1990, p. 302), social capital refers to
“social resources inherent in social relationships that facilitate a social outcome”. It can
occur at any level of social aggregation (Parcel & Menaghan, 1993), and is usually
operationalized as the features and quality of social relationships in a range of social
contexts (Coleman, 1990; Lin, 2001; Portes, 1998; Putnam, 2000). Social capital
“provides a conceptual link between the attributes of individual actors and their
immediate social contexts, most notably the household, school, and neighborhood”
(Furstenberg & Hughes, 1995, p. 582).
There is well-established evidence that family social capital, referred to as the bonds
between parents and children reflected in the time and attention that parents spent
interacting with children, monitoring their activities, and promoting their well-being and
social adjustment (Coleman, 1990), is associated with a variety of educational, behavioral,
and emotional outcomes of children and adolescents, including decreased likelihood of
school dropout (Coleman & Hoffer, 1987; Croninger & Lee, 2001), higher educational
aspiration (McNeal, 1999), better academic performance (Coleman, 1988; Coleman &
Hoffer, 1987; Hao & Bonstead-Bruns, 1998; Valenzuela & Dornbusch, 1994; White &
Glick, 2000), fewer behavior problems (Parcel & Dufur, 2001; Parcel & Menaghan,
1993), and better social and emotional adjustment (Hagan et al., 1996; Lou & Siantz,

62
1997). Social capital embedded in neighborhoods, termed community social capital,
which consists of social relationships among resident adults and youths reflected by
social networks, norms, trust, a sense of belonging to the community, and civic
engagement (Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 1993), is also found to be predictive of various
youth developmental outcomes such as lower levels of depression (Stevenson, 1998),
decreased externalizing behaviors ( Beyers, Bates, Pettit, & Dodge, 2003), better health-
related quality of life (Drukker, Kaplan, Feron & Van Os, 2003), and increased social
competency (Rankin & Quane, 2002). It has been suggested that community social
capital allows parents to “establish norms and reinforce each other’s sanctioning of the
children” (Coleman, 1990, p. 318); it establishes an extra-familiar social network that
provides social control and monitoring functions for children and adolescents living in
the neighborhood (Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, Klebanov, & Sealand, 1993; Coleman, 1990;
Sampson, 1997; Simons et al., 2004).
In addition to family and community social capital, resources inherent in the school
and peer groups also play a significant role in the development of children and
adolescents, although their effects have been less studied. Croniger and Lee’s study (2001)
found that school social capital, reflected by student-teacher relationships (e.g., students’
belief about how teachers are interested in them, value what they say, care about them,
etc.), largely reduced the probability of high school dropout. Drawing on a nationally
representative sample (N=10,465) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent
Health (Add Health), Crosnoe (2004) also found that students performed better
academically if they attended schools that had stronger student-teacher bonds. With
regard to the effect of social capital inherent in peer groups, Ream’s study (2005) on

63
Mexican American achievement found peer social capital to be robust and fungible
resources that bolster the academic performance of secondary school youths, where peer
social capital was assessed by the density, range, intimacy, and trusting level of peer
relationships. Coleman (1961) also suggested in his earlier work that children were
extraordinarily influenced by their peers, and more likely to consider the ties with friends
as more important than that with parents or teachers.

The Interplay among Different Dimensions of Social Capital
Ecological theories propose that various components of the ecology of human
development not only play a role independently on the development of children and
adolescents, but are intertwined with each other to exert synergistic effects
(Bronfenbrenner, 1986). For example, the impact of family management on youth
development may depend on characteristics of the community in which youths and
families reside. Studies have suggested that neighborhood characteristics moderate
associations between parenting and adolescent conduct problems (Coley & Hoffman,
1996; Pettit, Bates, Dodge, & Meece, 1999). Applying this perspective to the study of
social capital, it is reasonable to conceive that the functioning of social capital embedded
in one social context is contingent on social capital inherent in another context. In the
early life course, family, school, peer group, and community represent the primary social
contexts wherein social capital may accumulate and exert an impact on children and
adolescents (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998).
Parcel and Dufur (2001) illustrated three types of effects while examining how
family and school social capital work together to promote child achievement, including: 1)

64
booster effects, when children who experience favorable conditions both at home and at
school achieve better; 2) compensating effects, when a deficit in resources at home is
partially compensated by supportive resources at school; and 3) threshold effects, when
resources in both environments promote child achievement, but in combination have
more modest effects than they would have had in strictly additive models. Drawing on
data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Parcel and Dufur’s analysis (2001)
demonstrated a “compensating effect” between family and school social capital,
indicating that having access to higher levels of school social capital would buffer some
of the negative effect that lower levels of family social capital might have on the
academic achievement of youths. Based on a nationally representative sample (N=11,927)
from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), Crosnoe (2004)
also examined how social capital inherent in the school moderated the longitudinal
association between an ineffective conduit of family-based social capital and adolescent
academic performance. This study identified a significant “booster effect”, suggesting
that socio-emotional resources at school magnified those at home; that is, adolescents
who had higher levels of social capital at school benefited more from social capital at
home.
Empirical studies have also examined the multiplicative effects between family and
community social capital. Building upon the premise that neighborhoods with more
structural disadvantages and less collective efficacy may place more of a burden of
socializing youth on the shoulders of parents, Beyers and colleagues (2003) used data
from a longitudinal, multisite study, the Child Development Project, to examine whether
the actual protectiveness of parenting strategies and parent-adolescent relationship

65
qualities vary depending on neighborhood characteristics. Their multilevel analysis found
that neighborhood characteristics did not independently relate to youths’ externalizing
behaviors, but rather played a role in moderating the effects of parental monitoring on
youth behavioral outcomes. Specifically, the association between the decrease in
externalizing behaviors and parental monitoring was significantly more pronounced in
youth living in neighborhoods with more residential instability. Rankin and Quane (2002)
also tested the interaction between family management and neighborhood collective
efficacy while examining the interrelated effects of neighborhoods, families and peers on
inner-city African American youth. They found parental monitoring to exert a stronger
effect on youth social competency and problem behaviors in the desired direction when
collective efficacy is low in the neighborhood, which reflected a compensatory effect. In
their longitudinal study of 492 adolescents followed up for thirteen years in Toronto,
Hagan et al (1996) confirmed Coleman’s finding about the detrimental effect of
migration on children’s emotional adjustment, and suggested that the detrimental effect
was partially neutralized among those who received more family support, because
parental support, as one kind of family social capital, compensated for the loss of social
bonds established in their former communities. To summarize, these studies support the
contention that family social capital becomes especially important for youth development
when insufficient stocks of social capital exist at the community level.
Taken together, evidence of the interaction effects between different dimensions of
social capital demonstrated the need to evaluate how the combined effects of social
capital inherent in multiple social contexts might be more important than their additive
effects alone. However, certain knowledge gaps remain in the extant literature in this line

66
of inquiry. First, existing studies rarely incorporated various dimensions of social capital
into one conceptual framework, which restricted their ability to examine the mechanism
by which multiple dimensions of social capital interact with one another to influence the
development of children and adolescents. Second, as a result of the first gap, although
some recent studies have started to explore the complex interplay among social capital
embedded in different social contexts, they were mostly confined to examining the
intersections of limited dimensions of social capital (e.g., family and community, or
family and school). Although the need of conceptualizing individual outcomes as affected
by multiple institutions has been expressed by others (Parcel & Dufur, 2001a, 2001b), the
test has yet to be done by empirical studies. To advance our knowledge of the intricate
social ecology that shapes youth development, it is necessary to recognize and to
investigate the intersections of social capital inherent in a full range of social contexts
where children and adolescents develop physically, socially, and emotionally.
This study addressed these gaps by incorporating social capital embedded in multiple
social contexts (i.e., family, school, peer, and community) into one conceptual framework,
thus being able to investigate how they interact and combine to influence the
psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant children. Grounded on the shared
understanding that community provides the context where family processes, school
functions, and peer interactions take place (Rankin & Quane, 2002), one major
hypothesis tested in the study was that: Social capital embedded in the family, school,
and peer groups would show differential effects on the psychosocial adjustment of
migrant children when there is lower level of social capital accessible in the community
as opposed to higher.

67
Figure 3.1 Hypothesized Model of Social Capital Effects on the Psychosocial Adjustment of Chinese Migrant Children
Community
Social Capital
+
+
+
+
+
+
Family
Social Capital
School
Social Capital
Peer
Social Capital
Psychosocial
Adjustment

Dashed lines indicate moderating effects

Controls

-Sex
-Age
-Length of
Residence in the
City
-School Type
-Family Structure
-Family Human
Capital
-Family Financial
Capital

68
Figure 3.1 presents the conceptual framework of this study. Psychosocial adjustment
(PA), assessed by self-esteem, depressive symptoms, hostility, and life satisfaction, is the
target outcome. Social capital embedded in the family (FSC), school (SSC), peer groups
(PSC), and community (CSC) are the major predictor variables, whereof community
social capital is hypothesized to moderate the effects of other dimensions of social capital.
In addition to the social capital variables, several socio-demographic variables were also
controlled for in the conceptual model, including gender, age, length of residence in the
city, school type (public school vs. migrant children’s school), family structure (living
with both parents vs. other family arrangement), family human capital (i.e., parents’
cognitive skills and educational attainment), and family financial capital (i.e., financial
resources used for the household and the child).

Methods
Participants and Procedure
Participants of the study were 815 4
th
– 9
th
grade migrant students from 14 schools
located in four administrative districts
*
of Shanghai. The study employed a school-based
multi-stage random sampling method. First, four administrative districts where migrants
were most concentrated were selected. Three of the four districts, Yangpu District,
Pudong District, and Fengxian District, provide education for migrant children in both
public schools and migrant children’s schools, while the fourth district, Xuhui District,
has closed all the migrant children’s schools and accommodated all migrant children in

*
The urban administrative system in China is composed of five levels: province, city, district, street, and
residential committee. The number of districts within a city and the geographic space and population size of
a district vary depending on the size of the city.

69
public schools. Second, a complete list of all public elementary and secondary schools
that accommodate both native and migrant students in each of the four districts, as well as
all migrant children’s schools in the first three districts, were obtained from the
Educational Bureau. In each district, one public elementary school and one public
secondary school were randomly selected from the list of public schools. Likewise, in
each of the first three districts, one elementary and one secondary school was randomly
selected from the migrant children’s schools. Therefore, a total of eight public schools
and six migrant children’s schools were selected into study. Third, a complete list of
migrant students in the 4
th
–9
th
grades of the public elementary and secondary schools was
obtained from the school officials, and 60 migrant students were randomly selected from
each school. Similarly, 60 migrant students were randomly selected from each of the
migrant children’s schools, based on a complete list of 4
th
–9
th
grade students studying at
those schools. By doing so, a total of 840 migrant students from eight public schools and
six migrant children’s schools were recruited for the study. One parent of each selected
student, who considered himself/herself most knowledgeable of the student as well as
their family and neighborhood environment, was also invited to participate in the study.
Prior to the administration of surveys, students selected as potential participants were
provided with the child/adolescent assent forms and were asked to take home consent
forms to their parents. Students were eligible to participate in the study if they completed
the child/adolescent assent form and also their parents provided active written consent for
their participation. Students who met the eligibility criteria thus participating in the study
completed a paper-and-pencil survey in their classrooms during a single class period (45-
50 min) under the guidance of trained research assistants. The surveys were identified

70
only by a code number; students’ names or any other identifying information were not
required. The surveys were provided in Chinese, and the students were encouraged to ask
the research assistants to clarify the meaning of any question they felt difficult to
understand. Parents of the participating students completed a separate paper-and-pencil
survey brought back home by the students and returned to the research staff in sealed
envelops by the students.
Following the consent/assent procedure, 815 students eventually participated in the
study and completed the student survey, and 772 of their parents completed the parent
survey. Therefore, the final sample used for analysis included 772 pairs of migrant
student and parent participants. Of the 772 migrant children and adolescents, 400 were
male (53.2%) and 352 were female (46.8%). The average age of the student participants
was 12.87 (SD=1.932), with a range from 9 years to 18 years. More than half of the
students (58.5%, N=437) were studying at public schools, while the other 41.5 percent
(N=310) attended migrant children’s schools. A majority of the migrant children (86.2%)
were living with both parents in the household. The educational attainments of the
migrant children’s parents were mostly below the high school level, and the monthly
incomes of these families were mostly less than 3000 Yuan (about $438). Full descriptive
statistics of the sample characteristics were presented in Table 2.1.

Measures
Outcome Variable
Psychosocial Adjustment was assessed as a latent construct composed of four
related adjustment outcomes: 1) self-esteem, measured by the Rosenberg Self-Esteem

71
Scale (RSE) (Rosenberg, 1965), a 10 item instrument that has been used in research with
ethnically diverse samples including immigrant children, which shows good reliability
and validity (Rumbaut, 1994). Respondents were asked to describe the degree to which
the description about self in each item was true for them, such as “On the whole, I am
satisfied with myself” and “I feel that I have a number of good qualities”. Each item was
rated on a 4-point response scale ranging from “not true at all (1)” to “very true (4)”, with
higher scores indicating higher self-esteem. The Cronbach’s alpha of the RSE in this
sample was .671; 2) depression, measured by the Center for Epidemiological Studies
Depression Scale for Children (CES-DC) (Faulstich et al., 1986), a 20 item instrument
that assesses concurrent depressive symptoms and has been widely used in research
across various populations including immigrant children (Short & Johnston, 1997).
Respondents were asked to describe how much they experienced the symptom stated in
each item during the past week, such as “I was bothered by things that usually don’t
bother me”, “I felt sad”, and “I felt down and unhappy”. Each item was rated on a 4-point
response scale that included “Not at all”, “A little”, “Some”, and “A lot”, with higher
scores indicating more depressive symptoms. The Cronbach’s alpha of the CES-DC in
this sample was .827; 3) hostility, measured by the eight item subscale of hostility
adapted from the Aggression Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1992). Respondents were
asked to rate each item on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “extremely uncharacteristic
of me (1)” to “extremely characteristic of me (5)”, indicating how much the descriptions
of the feelings in the items were characteristic of themselves, such as “I am sometimes
eaten up with jealousy”, and “I am suspicious of overly friendly strangers”. The
Cronbach’s alpha of the hostility scale in this sample was .824; and 4) life satisfaction,

72
measured by the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) (Diener, 1985), a 5 item instrument
with favorable psychometric properties that assesses global life satisfaction. Participants
rated on a 7-point response scale ranging from “strongly disagree (1)” to “strongly agree
(7)” to indicate how much they agreed with the statement in each item, such as “I am
satisfied with my life”, and “In most ways, my life is close to my ideal”. The Cronbach’s
alpha of the SWLS in this sample was .832. In this study, the standardized sum scores of
the four scales, representing four distinct but correlated adjustment outcomes, were used
as observed indicators to form the latent construct of psychosocial adjustment. The scores
of depression and hostility were reverse coded so that their direction of variation is
consistent with that of self-esteem and life satisfaction.

Social Capital Variables
Measures of social capital in this study drew upon existing indicators used by past
studies, supplemented by scales and questions that tapped into specific
operationalizations of social capital and were adapted to the particular Chinese social
context. Family, school, and peer social capital were assessed through children’s report,
while community social capital was assessed through parents’ report.
Family social capital was assessed by the quality of parent-child interaction and
parental monitoring. Parent-child interaction was measured by the Parent-Child
Relationship Inventory (Dixon, Fair, & Bermes, 2004), which assessed the behavioral,
affective and cognitive components of parent-child relationship from the child’s
perspective. The PCRI was composed of 40 items that captured the experience of
children in their relationship to parents in four areas: 1) eight items on their experience of

73
things that parents are supposed to do for children (e.g., “My parent pays attention to
me”); 2) nine items on their experience of things that children are supposed to do for
parents (e.g., “I do housework for my parent”); 3) eight items on their experience of
things that parents and children are supposed to do together (e.g., “My parent and I play
together”); and 4) 15 items on their experience of the feelings that parents and children
should have for each other and the way they behave with each other (e.g., “We trust each
other”). Participants rated each item on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “never (1)” to
“always (5)”, indicating how often these behaviors and feelings actually occur in their
relationship with parents. The Cronbach’s alpha of the PCRI in this study was .938, and
the Cronbach’s alpha of the four subscales were .749, .740, .756, and .927 respectively,
indicating good internal consistency of the entire scale and each of the subscales. Parental
monitoring was measured by two self-designed scales that incorporated the items used in
previous studies. One scale was composed of eight items asking about how often the
parent involved in their children’s school activities such as attending a school meeting or
talking with the teacher about their children’s school performance, as well as how often
the parent disciplined children at home such as limiting the time they watch TV or go out
with friends. Each item was rated on a 4-point scale ranging from “never (1)” to “often
(4)”. The Cronbach’s alpha of the scale in this study was .620. The other scale was
composed of four items examining the parent’s knowledge about their children’s after-
school activities, including where they are, who they are with, what they are doing, and
when they are returning home. Each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging
from “never (1)” to “always (5)”. The Cronbach’s alpha of the scale in this study
was .800. The standardized sum scores of the four subscales of the PCRI and the

74
standardized sum scores of the two parental monitoring scales were used as observed
indicators to form the latent construct of family social capital.
Peer social capital was assessed by the quality of peer relationships supposed to
provide resources for the development of children and adolescents. The Friendship
Qualities Scale (Bukowski, Hoza, & Boivin, 1994) was employed to measure peer
relationships. The scale was composed of 23 items that represented five dimensions of
friendship: companionship (four items; e.g., “My friends and I spent all our free time
together”), conflict (four items; e.g., “I can get into fight with my friend”), help/aid (five
items; e.g., “my friend would help me if I needed it”), security (five items; e.g., “If I have
a problem at school or at home, I can talk to my friend about it”), and closeness (five
items; e.g., “I feel happy when I am with my friend”). Each item was rated on a 5-point
Likert scale that indicated the extent to which the description of the relationship with
friends in the item was true for the participant, ranging from “not true at all (1)” to “very
true (5)”. In this study, the Cronbach’s alpha of the FQS was .872, and the Cronbach’s
alpha of the five subscales were .779, .747, .753, .655(.728), and .790 respectively,
indicating high internal consistency within each dimension. The standardized sum scores
of these five subscales were then used as observed indicators to form the latent construct
of peer social capital.
School social capital was assessed by school climate and the quality of student-
teacher relationships. School climate was measured by 10 items adapted from the
Inventory of School Climate-Student Version (ISC-S) that assessed multiple dimensions
of school climate, including consistency and clarity of rules, teacher support, student
commitment and achievement orientation, positive and negative peer interactions, and

75
safety (Brand et al., 2003). Participants rated each item on a 5-point scale ranging from
“not true at all (1)” to “very true (5)”, indicating how much the descriptions in the items
were characteristic of the actual situations of their schools. Sample items of the scale
included “Teachers go out of their way to help students”, “Students work hard for good
grades in classes” and “Students enjoy doing things with each other in school activities”.
The Cronbach’s alpha of the school climate scale in this study was .698. The other
dimension of school social capital, student-teacher relationships, was measured by a
seven item scale which was used to assess school social capital in Croninger and Lee’s
(2001) study. Participants rated each item on a 5-point scale ranging from “not true at all
(1)” to “very true (5)”, indicating how much the descriptions in the items were
characteristic of their experience in their relationships with the teacher. Sample items of
the scale included “The teachers are interested in me” and “The teachers recognize and
praise me when I work hard”. The Cronbach’s alpha of the student-teacher relationship
scale in this study was .857. The standardized sum scores of these two scales were used
as observed indicators to form the latent construct of school social capital
Community social capital was assessed by four dimensions that captured the
neighborhood characteristics through the responses of parents: social cohesion and trust
in adults (SC & T-A), informal social control (ISC), social cohesion and trust in children
(SC & T-C), and solidarity of the neighborhood. The SC & T-A was measured using a
five item collective efficacy scale developed by Sampson and colleagues (1997), which
examined the bonds and trust among adult residents of the neighborhood. Participants
were asked to describe how much the descriptions in the items were characteristic of the
neighborhood they lived in, such as “People in this neighborhood help each other out”

76
and “This is a close-knit neighborhood”. Each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale
ranging from “extremely uncharacteristic (1)” to “extremely characteristic (5)”. The
Cronbach’s alpha of the SC & T-A scale in this sample was .631. Since the study focused
on children, a separate seven item SC &T-C scale was used particularly to assess the
bonds and trust among children in the neighborhood, which include items like “Children
in this neighborhood are close-knit”, and “Children in this neighborhood play together a
lot”. Questions of this scale had been used previously in a Dutch study on social capital
and children’s health-related quality of life (Drukker, Kaplan, Feron, & Os, 2003).
Similar to the SC & T-A scale, each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale, and the
Cronbach’s alpha of the SC & T-C scale in this sample was .635. Informal social control
was measured by a five item scale that examined the ability and willingness of adult
neighbors to provide monitoring and social control for children living in the
neighborhood. Development of the scale referred to the collective efficacy scale
developed by Sampson and colleagues (1997) and was adapted to the particular Chinese
context. Sample items include “There are a lot of adults around here that my children
could look up to” and “We watch out for each other’s children in this neighborhood”.
Each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale, and the Cronbach’s alpha of the ISC scale
in this sample was .769. Solidarity of the neighborhood was measured by two questions
asking the participants to describe how strong was their feeling of togetherness with
neighbors and how strong was their sense of belonging to the neighborhood. Each
question was responded to on a 5-point scale ranging from “very weak (1)” to “very
strong (5)”, with higher scores indicating stronger solidarity of the neighborhood. In data
analysis of this study, since community social capital was tested as a moderator, the sum

77
score of the twelve social cohesion and trust items, the five informal social control items,
and the two solidarity items was median-split to create two subgroups characterized by
high and low community social capital respectively.

Socio-demographic Variables
The socio-demographic variables included in the test of hypothesized models
included gender, age, length of residence in the city, school type, family structure, family
human capital, and family financial capital. Gender (1=female, 0=male), age (in years),
and school type (1=public school, 0=migrant children’s school) were self-explanatory.
Length of residence was measured by the number of months that the children have lived
in the city. Family structure was examined by a binary variable (1=children living with
both parents, 0=other family arrangement); it was included given the assumption that the
physical presence of both parents would influence the parental involvement in the
children (Coleman, 1988). Family human capital was assessed by parents’ educational
attainments, which were expected to influence the cognitive environment within a home
(Coleman, 1988). In this study, father and mother’s educational levels were reported by
children on seven categories ranging from “didn’t go to or didn’t graduate from
elementary school (1)” to “university graduate or higher (7)”. This is a common
operationalization of human capital in prior empirical studies (Coleman & Hoffer, 1987;
Teachman et al., 1996, 1997). Family financial capital was assessed by three indicators:
monthly household income, household equipment, and poverty index. Monthly household
income, referring to income from all sources in the household, was reported by parents on
12 categories ranging from “lower than RMB 100 Yuan (1)” (about $12.5) to “More than

78
RMB 10000 Yuan (12)” (about $1,250). Household equipment was measured by asking
parents to indicate whether their family has electronic items such as refrigerator, washing
machine, air conditioning, and a computer. The number of electronics that the family
possesses was representative of the family’s economic condition. The response to each
item was dummy coded and the sum of responses to all items (ranging from 0 to 10)
composed the household equipment score. The poverty index included three questions
asking the parents how difficult it had been in the past year to purchase furniture or
household equipment that needed to be replaced, to buy food their children should have,
and obtain medical care for their children. Participants rated each question on a 5-point
scale ranging from “very difficult (1)” to “not difficult at all (5)”, with higher scores
indicating a lower poverty level. The standardized scores of the monthly household
income, the household equipment, and the poverty index were used as three observed
indicators to form the latent construct of family financial capital. Please refer to
Appendix I for a complete list of latent constructs in the study and corresponding
measures of observed variables for each.

Data Analysis
Structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted using Mplus 5.0 (Muthén &
Muthén , 2007) to test the hypothesized models. SEM permits the use of latent constructs
composed of multiple observed variables and allows for estimating the relationships
among latent constructs while providing explicit estimates of measurement errors to
increase the accuracy of analysis results (Byrne, 2001). Moreover, it permits the
simultaneous estimation of direct and indirect paths, estimating each path after the effects

79
of all other paths are accounted for. SEM also offers a multiple-group approach that
enables simultaneous model fitting for two (or more) samples at a time and allows across-
group constraints to test the invariance of factor loadings, path coefficients, intercepts,
variances, and covariance, which renders it an ideal method to test moderation or
interaction effects. These features of SEM make it an especially well-suited technique for
this study, given the hypothesized moderating effect of community social capital on the
associations between other dimensions of social capital and the psychosocial adjustment
of migrant children. The study followed the two-step approach to SEM (Kline, 2005),
testing the measurement model at the first step to establish a statistically reliable measure
for each latent construct, and then testing the structural model at the second step to
examine the multivariate relationships among latent constructs. The study did not
perform any particular analysis for missing data because no one study variable had more
than 5% missing data. Considering the adequate sample size, the small percent of missing
data did not seriously distort analysis results.

Results
Test of Measurement Model
Invariance of factor structures of the six latent constructs (i.e., family social capital,
school social capital, peer social capital, family human capital, family financial capital,
and the psychosocial adjustment) across the high and low community social capital
groups were first evaluated before proceeding to test the hypothesized structural model.
Multiple fit indices were used to assess the goodness of the model, including: 1) Chi
Square ( 
2
), the likelihood ratio test statistic, where an associated probability value

80
showing non-significant 
2
represents a closer fit of the hypothesized model to the perfect
fit (Bollen, 1989). However, due to the sensitivity of the likelihood ratio test to sample
size, it is not uncommon for a well-fitting hypothesized model to yield a significant 
2
if
the sample size is large (Byrne, 2001); 2) the Comparative Fit Index (CFI), which
compares the performance of the specified model to the performance of a baseline
independence model, where values above 0.90 denote a good model fit (Bentler, 1990);
and 3) the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA; Steiger, 1990), where
values less than 0.05 indicate a “close fit”, values between 0.05 and 0.08 suggest a
“reasonable fit”, and values above 0.1 denote a “poor fit” (Kline, 2005).
As indicated by the result, the multiple-group measurement model with factor
loadings constrained to be equal across high and low community social capital groups
provided a good fit to the data ( 
2
= 554.923, df = 370, p<.001, CFI = 0.963, RMSEA
= .037) with CFI greater than .90 and RMSEA smaller than .05. All observed variables
were significantly loaded on the corresponding latent constructs in the expected
directions, suggesting that the selected indicators reasonably represented the underlying
constructs in a statistically reliable manner, and the factor structures were the same for
both groups. The standardized factor loadings of indicators on each latent construct were
all greater than the commonly adopted criteria of acceptable loadings (i.e., .30) for
keeping certain indicators (Agnew, 1991). The measurement model also examined the
correlations among the theoretical constructs and found them all significantly related.

81
Test of Structural Model
Of central interest in the study is the equality of paths from family, school, and peer
social capital to the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children while community social
capital is at differential levels. Following the multiple-group approach in SEM, I first
evaluated the fits of a series of alternative structural models with various degrees of
constraints, in order to identify the best fitting model and examine the invariance of path
coefficients. A summary of the comparison of model fits is presented in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1 Comparison of the Fit of Alternative Models: Multiple Group Analysis
with Community Social Capital as Moderator

Model Model Description 
2
df 
2
df p
1 Fully constrained, with all factor
loadings and structural effects equal
across groups

869.753

560

2 As model 1, release the path from FSC
a
to PA
d
, allowing free estimates of the
structural effects in each group

862.699

559

7.054

1

.008
3 As model 1, release the path from SSC
b
to PA, allowing free estimates of the
structural effects in each group

863.797

559

5.956

1

.015
4 As model 1, release the path from PSC
c
to PA, allowing free estimates of the
structural effects in each group

869.732

559

0.021

1

.885
5 As model 2, release the path from SSC
to PA, allowing free estimates of both
structural effects in each group

861.911

558

0.788

1

.375

a. FSC refers to family social capital
b. SSC refers to school social capital
c. PSC refers to peer social capital
d. PA refers to psychosocial adjustment

Model 1 of Table 3.1 exhibited a fully-constrained model with all factor loadings and
structural effects being equal across the high and low community social capital groups.
Based on model 1, model 2, 3, and 4 released the three paths from family, school, and

82
peer social capital to psychosocial adjustment, one at a time, allowing free estimates of
the path coefficients in each group. The significant decrease of chi square value from
model 1 to model 2 (
2
= 7.054, df = 1, p<.01) and from model 1 to model 3 ( 
2
=
5.956, df = 1, p<.05) suggested that allowing the paths from family social capital or
school social capital to psychosocial adjustment to vary across groups would improve the
overall fit of the multiple-group structural model. However, the slight and non-significant
decrease of chi square value from model 1 to model 4 suggested that releasing the equal
constraint on the path from peer social capital to psychosocial adjustment would not
contribute to better model fit. Therefore, in consideration of parsimony, the model in
which the effect of peer social capital was imposed an equal constraint across groups
would be more preferable. Then the analysis followed to examine if releasing both of the
paths from family social capital and school social capital to psychosocial adjustment
would improve the model fit based on model 2, in which only the effect of family social
capital was separately estimated. The slight non-significant reduction in chi square value
indicated no improvement of model fit with the loss of one degree of freedom ( 
2
=
0.788, df = 1, NS), which suggested keeping the more parsimonious model. Therefore,
according to the comparison of above alternative models, model 2 with invariant paths
from school and peer social capital to psychosocial adjustment but free estimates of the
effect of family social capital across groups was demonstrated to be the best fitting model.
The selected multiple-group structural model provided a good fit to the data.
Although the Chi-Square value ( 
2
= 862.699, df = 559) was large and significant, mainly
because of its sensitivity to large sample size, other goodness-of-fit indices demonstrated
satisfying results: CFI (.943) was above .90, and RMSEA (.038) was lower than .05. The

83
total variances in the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children explained by this
model were 56.9% and 64.7% respectively for the low and high community social capital
groups. The standardized and unstandardized coefficients of all structural paths linking
social capital to psychosocial adjustment in each group were presented in Table 3.2.

Table 3.2 Across-Group Unstandardized and Standardized Coefficients of
Structural Paths
a
Linking Social Capital to Psychosocial Adjustment

Psychosocial Adjustment
Full Sample Low CSC
b
Group
High CSC

Low CSC

High SSC
c
Low SSC

Family Social Capital .365(.385)*** .174(.212)* .445(.466)*** .205(.372)***
School Social Capital .388(.374)*** .388(.462)*** - -
Peer Social Capital .171(.154)** .171(.179)** .304(.303)*** .304(.523)***

* p<.05; ** p<.01; *** p<.001

a. Standardized coefficients in parentheses
b. CSC refers to community social capital
c. SSC refers to school social capital

As hypothesized, community social capital moderated the effect of family social
capital on the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children. Family social capital
exhibited stronger positive effect on children’s adjustment in the high community social
capital group (B = .365, p <.001) than in the low community social capital group (B
= .174, p <.01). School social capital was also significantly and positively associated with
the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children, but at the same magnitudes for both
high and low community social capital groups (B = .388, p <.001). Likewise, higher

84
Figure 3.2 Standardized Solutions for the Multi-Group Structural Model of Social Capital Effects on the Psychosocial
Adjustment of Chinese Migrant Children: Community Social Capital as Moderator
Family
Social Capital
School
Social Capital
Peer
Social Capital
Psychosocial
Adjustment
H .385***
L .212**
H .374*** L .462***
L .179**
H .154***
H .517***
H .545***
H .454***
L .497**
L .494**
L .341**
H: High Community Social Capital Group

L: Low Community Social Capital Group

* p<.05; ** p<.01; *** p<.001

85
levels of peer social capital predicted better adjustment outcomes of migrant children in
both high and low community social capital groups and their strengths of effects were
comparable (B = .171, p <.01). A comparison of the standardized effects of various
dimensions of social capital within each subgroup indicated that family social capital
exerted the strongest impact on the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children with
higher levels of community social capital ( β = .385, p <.001), while school social capital
appeared to be the most influential for migrant children with lower levels of community
social capital ( β = .462, p <.001). The standardized solution of the multi-group structural
model is presented in Figure 3.2.
Of the socio-demographic variables, the effects of sex and school type were found to
be mediated by family, school, and peer social capital on the psychosocial adjustment of
migrant children in both high and low community social capital groups. Being male and
attending public schools were associated with higher levels of social capital of all kinds,
which, in turn, predicted better psychosocial adjustment. Family social capital also
mediated the effect of family financial capital, while school social capital mediated the
effect of age on children’s adjustment. The wealthier the family, the higher the family
social capital that children had access to, and the younger the children, the stronger their
bonds with teachers were at school. However, the mediating effect of family social
capital linking family human capital to adjustment outcomes was only observed in the
group of migrant children with higher levels of community social capital. Higher levels
of educational attainment of parents predicted higher levels of family social capital,
which led to better adjustment of children when there were adequate levels of community

86
social capital. A summary of the standardized direct, indirect and total effects of major
predictor variables is presented in Table 3.3.

Table 3.3 Standardized Direct, Indirect, and Total Effects of Major Predictor
Variables on Children’s Psychosocial Adjustment

Major Predictor Variables Psychosocial Adjustment
Low CSC Group High CSC Group
Direct Indirect Total Direct Indirect Total
Family Social Capital .212 - .212 .385 - .385
School Social Capital .462 - .462 .374 - .374
Peer Social Capital .179 - .179 .154 - .154
Family Human Capital .049 .028 .077 .042 .052 .094
Family Financial Capital -.004 .044 .040 -.003 .082 .079
Gender .021 .112 .133 .018 .122 .140
Age .029 -.129 -.100 .022 -.114 -.092
School Type .035 .248 .283 .028 .242 .270

Another two series of multiple group analyses were successively conducted within
high and low community social capital groups respectively to examine whether school
social capital moderated the effects of family and peer social capital on the psychosocial
adjustment of migrant children. Following the same procedure as explained above, the
second-order interaction analysis identified a significant moderating effect of school
social capital in the low community social capital group. The final multi-group structural
model testing the differences in the effects of family and peer social capital across groups
with high and low levels of school social capital provided a reasonable fit to the data ( 
2
= 656.205, df = 475, CFI=.910, RMSEA=.045). Family social capital presented stronger
effect on psychosocial adjustment for children with higher levels of school social capital
( β = .466, p <.001) compared to those with lower levels of school social capital ( β = .372,
p <.001). In contrast, peer social capital was relatively more influential for children with

87
lower levels of school social capital ( β = .523, p <.001) versus those with higher ( β
= .303, p <.001). The standardized and unstandardized path coefficients for family and
peer social capital in each subgroup are presented in Table 3.2.

Discussion
This study represents a pioneer effort to examine the psychosocial adjustment of
migrant children in mainland China as it relates to social capital embedded in a range of
children’s immediate social contexts, namely, the family, school, peer group, and
community. It aimed to examine, in which spheres, and under what conditions,
investments in social capital have the greatest payoffs for the psychosocial adjustment of
migrant children. Although an abundance of research has demonstrated the influences of
parents (Aseltine, 1995; Galambos & Maggs, 1991; Coleman & Hoffer, 1987; Parcel &
Menaghan, 1993), school (Croniger & Lee, 2001; Crosnoe, 2004; Parcel & Dufur, 2001;),
and peers (Laird, Pettit, Dodge, & Bates, 1999; Ream, 2005) on the development of
children and adolescents, this study goes beyond the existing literature by considering
effects of these proximal contexts as situated in the larger neighborhood structure and
processes and testing the potential moderating effects of community social capital on the
relationships among parental involvement, school bonds, peer relationships, and the
psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant children. In order to better capture the
intricate nature of human ecology by viewing major settings as intertwined rather than
isolated from each other (Call & Mortimer, 2001), the focus of this study is not on how
each dimension of social capital operates on the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese
migrant children, but rather on how these processes across multiple social contexts

88
interact with each other to exert synergistic effects on the child’s adjustment. Findings of
the study constitute an interesting and promising extension to prior studies of social
capital.
Results of this study provide clear evidence of the overlap and interactive nature
among multiple dimensions of social capital. Consistent with the argument of
Furstenberg (1993) that the effectiveness of family practices may differ depending on the
quality of neighborhoods, one primary finding of this research suggests that community
social capital does condition the effect of family social capital on the psychosocial
adjustment of migrant children. However, instead of a compensating effect as
demonstrated by some earlier research (Beyers et al., 2003; Rankin & Quane, 2002),
which considered parental involvement and monitoring as more important when less
resources can be counted on in the neighborhood, this study suggests a booster effect
between family and community social capital. That is, the association between family
social capital and children’s psychosocial adjustment is more pronounced if higher levels
of social capital are present in the neighborhood where the children and families live. In
other words, the benefits of parental involvement and monitoring for children’s
psychosocial adjustment are greater in cohesive neighborhoods with higher levels of trust
among residents and stronger social control over youth behaviors. This might result from
the feeling of being valued and cared that is consistently reinforced across social contexts,
which is consequential for the social and emotional well-being of children and
adolescents. The contingency of family social capital effect on the stock of community
social capital essentially implies that the effective functioning of families for the well-
being of children relies on an overall support system in the larger neighborhood structure

89
and processes. In contrast, where there are lower levels of cohesion, trust, and informal
social control in the neighborhood, although family social capital still exerts a significant
effect, it does not make as big a difference as in capital rich neighborhoods, probably
because the incongruence of connectedness and norms in the family and community
creates potential tension for children as they transfer across contexts. Rigorous parental
monitoring in a non-caring neighborhood climate might be perceived by children and
adolescents as overly restrictive, which counteracts the supposedly highly positive effect
of family social capital on children’s psychosocial well-being.
The discrepancy in the functioning of family social capital may also come from the
differential strategies that parents select in managing children depending on the type of
neighborhood they live in. As Coulton (1996) contends, parents may adjust their
management styles to conform to the practice of the majority according to the normative
climate of their neighborhoods. This could be especially true in the Chinese social
context where conformity to the majority and collectivity is granted paramount
importance in its cultural tradition (Huang & Harris, 1973). Therefore, in neighborhoods
where resident adults are more willing and engaged in supervising the activities of young
people, parents may assume greater responsibility in interacting with children and
monitoring their activities, which leads to increased effectiveness of family social capital.
Nevertheless, in neighborhoods lacking cohesion and social control, parents may not feel
pressured to pay as much attention to their children, thus generally reducing the
importance of family in the lives of children and rendering the effect of family social
capital more modest.

90
In addition, when there is lack of adequate bonds and social resources in the
neighborhood, children may spend much of their time in the school instead of in the
neighborhood, and place heavier weight on their relationships with teachers rather than
with neighbors. This provides a clue to understanding one of the study findings that, for
children with access to lower community social capital, school social capital becomes the
most influential factor for their psychosocial adjustment. Although in its absolute value
school social capital appears to be similarly important for both high and low community
social capital groups, it exhibits relatively more salient effect for the latter, where its
strength of effect overrates that of family social capital. Furthermore, within the group of
migrant children living in neighborhoods with limited resources, the second-order
interaction effect also indicates that the level of school social capital plays a significant
role in modifying the effects of family and peer social capital. The function of family
social capital in promoting children’s adjustment is more effective if school provides
more favorable environment and stronger student-teacher bonds. In other words, migrant
children who experience favorable conditions both at school and at home perform better
in their psychosocial adjustment. Earlier interpretation of the interaction between family
and community social capital might also apply to the interaction between family and
school contexts. The normative climate at school and teachers’ interest and care may urge
children and adolescents to perceive positively of the involvement and monitoring of
parents at home, thus magnifying the effect of family social capital.
Study results also point out the significance of peer social capital in the circumstance
of limited community and school resources. Coleman (1961) found children to be
extraordinarily influenced by their peers, and more likely to consider the ties with friends

91
as more important than that with parents or teachers. Through examination of the
interaction among multiple dimensions of social capital, this study finds the effect of peer
social capital to be contingent on resources embedded in other social domains. Peer social
capital shows consistently significant effect on children’s psychosocial adjustment
regardless of the level of community social capital, albeit at a relatively smaller
magnitude than that of family and school social capital. However, when resources
embedded in the school and neighborhood are both inadequate, the quality of peer
relationships becomes most important for the psychosocial adjustment of migrant
children. This is conceivable, since similar to the struggle of identity formation that
immigrant children in the western contexts experience, migrant children in the Chinese
urban cities are also faced with the challenge of identity transition. Settling in a different
culture can have negative implications for an individual’s sense of self and the way in
which one understand and relates to others (Coll & Magnuson, 2005). Various forms of
social connections with the host environment thus become critical for migrant children as
they manage the task of identity formation and transition in the urban setting. Presumably,
neighborhoods and schools are where children and adolescents spend much of their time
in the day and provide an immediate context for their contact with the urban environment.
However, when relationship ties within these two contexts are fairly weak, peer groups
may serve as a significant source that children rely on for acceptance and support and to
forge their self identities in adapting to life change. Simply put, the increased importance
of peer social capital in disadvantaged school and neighborhood circumstances reflects
the needs of migrant children to achieve a balanced identity with both their place of
origin and their current urban environment. The bonds with parents in the family sphere

92
represent more of a link with their original culture, while relationships in the
neighborhood, school, and peer contexts provide the means of contact with the host
culture. For migrant children to maintain healthy psychosocial adjustment, they will need
to rely on resources flowing through both kinds of relationship ties. Although
indispensable, family alone cannot provide children with all social resources needed to
support their psychosocial functioning.
In summary, findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the mechanism
by which social capital embedded in a range of social contexts interact with each other to
influence the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant children. The findings indicate
an extremely important role of community, given that the benefits on migrant children
generated from other dimensions of social capital can be magnified by the stock of
community social capital. Children living in neighborhoods with higher levels of social
capital hold greater potential to benefit from resources embedded in their family spheres,
while children living in resource limited neighborhoods would depend more on social
capital at school to achieve favorable psychosocial outcomes. Nevertheless, the results
should be interpreted in light of several limitations of the study. First, with a cross-
sectional study design, the study could not rigorously establish causal relationships
between social capital and the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children. There
remains the possibility that better psychosocial adjustment of migrant children results in
higher levels of social capital, rather than vice versa. Second, participants of the study are
selected from elementary and junior high school students. This excludes the large
population of migrant children who could not attend school in the city due to structural
barriers or financial hardship. Therefore, the sample selection criteria employed in this

93
study restricts the generalizability of research findings to the entire population of migrant
children. Third, results of the second-order multiple group structural equation models
need to be interpreted with particular caution because the smaller sample size of each
group at this level might have decreased the statistical power of the analysis.

Implications for Theory, Practice, Policy, and Future Research
Despite the limitations noted above, the current study has multiple implications for
the advancement of theory and for the design and delivery of social service programs and
social policy. It also points out promising directions for future research. First, the study
advances the theory of social capital by unraveling the mechanism by which family,
school, peer, and community social capital influence the psychosocial adjustment of
migrant children jointly and interactively. Identifying the conditional nature of social
capital effects would largely increase the power of the theory in understanding the
development of children and adolescents as a function of intricate human ecology with
intertwined rather than isolated contexts. Testing the theory in a nonwestern context also
potentially fortifies its cross-cultural validity and applicability.
Second, the significant effects of family, school, and peer social capital on children’s
psychosocial adjustment, as well as their relative strengths of effects contingent on the
level of community social capital, have important implications for the development of
social service programs. On the one hand, it suggests utilizing social capital building as
an innovative approach to preventing youth maladjustment and facilitating positive youth
development. The promise of social capital building model lies in the fact that, even in
situations where little or no wealth is available for an individual to accumulate financial

94
or material assets for child well-being, there remains a feasible means by which people
could generate potential resources to promote the development of children and
adolescents, simply through forging stronger ties in their social contexts. Social service
professionals should devote their efforts to facilitating the development of social capital
in various social domains. For example, in the family context, family service programs
could be designed to educate parents of the importance and feasible means to make
greater investment of time and attention in their children’s lives. In the school context,
efforts are expected to be made to encourage positive interactions between students and
teachers and foster teachers’ increased care for students. While in the community setting,
which is considered a most important component of the social ecology according to the
research finding, service programs should consider building public facilities, creating
opportunities for residents to interact, and fostering the culture of trust and mutual
support, all of which provide an impetus for the development of social capital. Moreover,
the interactive booster effect between family and community social capital at the first
order, and between family and school social capital at the second order, suggests that the
combination of investment in multiple social contexts would be most effective in
promoting the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children. A favorable social
environment that facilitates positive youth development requires adequate social
resources embedded in both proximal and external contexts in the child’s ecological
system. It is in great need of coalition and partnership among service professionals
focusing on particular social domains to combine their efforts in order to improve youth
outcomes through an integrative social capital building model.

95
On the other hand, the complex interplay among multiple dimensions of social
capital also suggests that, in order to reach the highest possible effectiveness, intervention
and prevention programs should be tailored to subgroups of migrant children with
differential levels of social resources in the neighborhood and school. Specifically, to
migrant children with lower levels of community social capital, school plays the most
important role in determining their psychosocial adjustment. Therefore, the focus of
prevention programs would be promoting favorable school climates and student-teacher
relationships, which is demonstrated to be beneficial for children’s adjustment outcomes.
However, when social capital embedded in the community and school are both limited
and not likely to improve, providing impetus and assistance for the construction of peer
social capital would be most effective for improved psychosocial adjustment of migrant
children, given that peer social capital becomes especially influential in this particular
situation. In contrast, for migrant children with higher levels of community social capital,
family appears to be most protective of their psychosocial adjustment, suggesting that
strengthening social capital in the family domain would generate the highest benefit for
this group of children and should be the focus of service programs. In summary,
according to findings of the complex interplay among multiple dimensions of social
capital, social service programs should tailor their strategies of social capital building to
fit the specific contextual situation, thus promoting children’s psychosocial adjustment
with highest possible effectiveness and efficiency.
Third, this study raises awareness among policymakers of the importance of taking
active measures at the structural level to promote the adjustment and well-being of
migrant children. The salience of community social capital for the adjustment of migrant

96
children, as indicated by the research finding that community social capital significantly
boosters the effective functioning of other dimensions of social capital, alerts government
to allocate more resources to empower communities. Possible structural solutions include
building favorable neighborhood environment, such as increasing safety and expanding
public spaces for residents to interact and for children to play, which potentially promote
the stock and flow of social resources at the community level. This kind of strategic
investment in community building is warranted and likely to be cost-effective, given that
the benefits generated for migrant children through other social arenas have the potential
to be magnified by favorable neighborhood environment.
Last, this study also points out several directions for future research. First, social
capital is not a static resource but continuously evolving as relationships develop.
Migrant children in particular may experience substantial change in multiple dimensions
of social capital as a consequence of their migration from rural to urban areas. Further
research should consider using a longitudinal design to track the changes of social capital
and model the effect of the changes on the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children.
It will be especially beneficial if pre- and post-migration measures of social capital can be
both examined. Statistically, the longitudinal design will also help establish the causal
relationships between social capital and psychosocial adjustment. Second, a comparison
of the social capital effects between migrant children and adolescents living in the urban
cities and other groups in the context of migration may yield fuller understanding of their
adaptation. Future research may consider using a comparative design to examine the
adjustment and well-being of the urban-dwelling migrant children and adolescents as
compared to those who are left behind in the rural areas by their migrant parents, and

97
those who return to the rural areas after living in the urban areas for a certain period of
time. The latter two populations are susceptible to extreme vulnerability no less than that
of their counterparts in the cities, but are paid even less attention by research and policy
to date. A comparison between migrant children and adolescents and their native urban
counterparts will also produce important knowledge of the disparity in adjustment and the
distinctive functioning of social capital within these two populations. Third, the test of
interaction among multiple dimensions of social capital developed in the present study
should be applied to other populations, developmental outcomes, and socio-cultural
contexts, so as to fortify its universal validity and applicability. A further step in this line
of inquiry would be developing cross-cultural studies that explore how culture shapes the
mechanism by which multiple dimensions of social capital function on various
development outcomes of children and adolescents in various adverse conditions.

Conclusion
This study tests a comprehensive model delineating the effects of family, school,
peer, and community social capital on the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant
children, particularly focusing on the interaction among various dimensions of social
capital. It identifies the conditional nature of social capital effects and reveals the intricate
mechanism by which multiple social contexts intertwine with each other to influence
youth development. Based on knowledge of the effective functioning and complex
interplay of multiple dimensions of social capital, this study proposes a social capital
building approach in social work practice with migrant children, and suggests tailoring
service programs to migrant children with differential levels of social capital in their

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various social contexts. Importantly, it indicates the need of combined investment in
multiple social contexts in order to promote the psychosocial adjustment of migrant
children with increased effectiveness and efficiency. Further empirical studies on the
multiplicative effects of social capital on a broader range of outcomes among a broader
range of populations are expected to continue building scientific knowledge that will
translate into evidence-based practices and policies.

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Chapter 4 Development and Use of Social Capital in the Psychosocial Adjustment
of Chinese Migrant Children: The Role of Children’s Personal Agency

Introduction
In the last two decades, social capital has become an increasingly popular and
influential concept in youth studies (Coleman, 1988; Helve, 2007; Morrow, 1999; Portes,
1998). A large body of literature has demonstrated the significant role of social capital in
the development of children and adolescents, including their psychosocial adjustment
(Coleman, 1988, 1990; Dorsey & Forehand, 2003; Hao & Bonstead-Bruns, 1998;
Morrow, 1999; Portes, 1998; Sun, 1999; Zhou & Bankston, 1994). Recent research is
moving forward to organize the study of social capital within an ecological framework,
which attempts to examine the effects of various dimensions of social capital embedded
in a full range of social contexts (i.e., family, school, peer, neighborhood) where youths
inhabit and grow (Day & Wen, 2007; Wu, forthcoming). However, the role of the child’s
personal agency in the functioning of social capital has been paid little attention.
In the theoretical tradition of social capital led by Coleman (1988), Bourdieu (1986),
and Putnam (2000), children and young people are predominantly viewed as passive
recipients of the influences of social capital, rather than active producers and consumers
in their own right (Holland, Reynolds, & Weller, 2007). The bulk of social capital
literature have generally failed to take into consideration the fact that children, as
independent agents, may actively generate, draw on, or negotiate their own social capital,
thus affecting the way that social capital works (Morrow, 1996, 1999). This has
constrained our ability to fully exploit the potential of social capital for the adjustment

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and well-being of children, especially in terms of utilizing the potential of children
themselves in the development and use of social capital.
Drawing on a sample of migrant children in mainland China, the purpose of the
present study is to examine how children’s personal agency, that is, their initiative and
actual efforts in developing and mobilizing social capital embedded in their immediate
social contexts, influences the way that social capital operates on their psychosocial
adjustment. The study employs a mixed-methods design to both test the effect of child’s
personal agency through quantitative survey and understand the experiences of children
in further depth through semi-structured interviews. Considering that for children in the
early life course, social capital is embedded in a range of social contexts in their
ecological system (i.e., family, school, peer group, and community), the major research
question addressed in the study is whether and how does the child’s personal agency in
generating and mobilizing each dimension of social capital moderate the effect of that
type of social capital on their psychosocial adjustment. It is hypothesized that, migrant
children who present higher degrees of personal agency in constructing social capital in a
certain social context will experience greater benefits of that dimension of social capital
on their psychosocial adjustment. Through highlighting the role of children as active
agents in shaping, rather than passively receiving the influences of social contexts, the
study is expected to provide important guidance for the development of social service
programs that revitalize the traditional model of empowerment in the practice with
children and young people in disadvantaged conditions.

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Psychosocial Adjustment of Migrant Children in Mainland China
The internal migration of mainland China is characterized by a population flow from
rural to urban areas in search of better living conditions. In recent years, increasing
numbers of children have migrated to cities with their parents. According to the 2000
census, there were a total of 121,070,000 migrants in China (National Bureau of Statistics,
2000). Of these, 19.37 percent were children under age 18 (National Working Committee
on Children and Women, 2003). In the city of Shanghai, there were 3.87 million migrants
by the end of the year 2000, of which 320,000 were school-age children (Li, 2004). The
number of migrants increased to 4.98 million by August 1, 2003, and amounted to 5.81
million by the end of 2005, of which 4.38 million had lived in Shanghai for more than
half a year, accounting for 24.6 percent of the city’s population (China Business News,
2007). It is anticipated that by 2010, one third of Shanghai’s population will be composed
of migrants (China Business News, 2007).
The continuously growing population of migrant children has evoked increasing
attention from the government and society at large. However, under China’s household
registration system (hukou), which is usually assigned at birth and has been designed to
control rural-urban mobility for economic and political purposes, migrant children are not
granted equal access to education, medical care, and many other social services, due to
urban residence requirements. Traditionally the local government where a child’s hukou
is registered is solely responsible for providing her/him with an education. Large
numbers of migrant children are thus denied entry into public schools in the city and are
forced to enroll in the so-called “migrant children’s schools”, which are of significantly
lower quality in terms of facilities and human resources. Presumably, the structural

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barriers of segregation and discrimination pose many threats to the psychosocial
adjustment of migrant children as they face numerous obstacles to successful adaptation
to the new urban environments. These adjustment problems may undermine their future
development in a variety of areas and cause other problems with potentially high social
costs. Nevertheless, migrant children are a newly emerging population and largely
understudied, despite their large numbers. Although issues of their education have been
addressed in previous research (Han, 2001), little has been done to understand patterns
and processes of their psychosocial adjustment.
Research in western societies has demonstrated that immigrant children are at higher
risk of developing adjustment problems either as a direct result of immigration stress or
indirectly through parental distress and disrupted family context (Short & Johnston,
1997). They face a number of challenges that include adapting to a new school and social
environment, segregation, prejudice, marginalization, and changes in family ecologies
(Baptiste, 1993; Chan, Ip, & Yuen, 1996; Chiu et al., 1992). In an overview of existing
research on immigrant children, problems related to their adjustment include low self-
esteem, depression, anxiety, stress, hostility, aggression, poor life satisfaction, and
deviant behaviors (Bankston & Zhou, 2002a; Baptiste, 1993; Jaycox et al., 2002; Padilla
& Duran, 1995; Rumbaut, 1994). Of the limited number of Chinese studies that looked at
the psychological wellbeing of migrant children, Li and colleague’s (2008) study on 1018
migrant children and 319 native urban children in Beijing found that levels of self-esteem
of migrant children were significantly lower than that of urban children, and levels of
self-esteem of migrant children attending migrant children’s schools were significantly
lower than that of migrant children attending public school. Nevertheless, to date there is

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a dearth of knowledge about how social and environmental factors influence the
psychosocial adjustment of migrant children. A comprehensive examination of the social
determinants, as well as the mechanism by which they function on the psychosocial
adjustment of migrant children is critical for understanding the experience of this
vulnerable population and for developing effective policies and service programs to
promote their well-being.

Effects of Social Capital on the Development of Children and Adolescents
Following the seminal work of Coleman (1990, p. 302), social capital refers to
“social resources inherent in social relationships that facilitate a social outcome”. It can
occur at any level of social aggregation (Parcel & Menaghan, 1993), and is usually
operationalized as the features and quality of social relationships in a range of social
contexts (Coleman, 1990; Lin et al., 2001; Portes, 1998; Putnam, 2000). Social capital
“provides a conceptual link between the attributes of individual actors and their
immediate social contexts, most notably the household, school, and neighborhood”
(Furstenberg & Hughes, 1995, p. 582).
There is well-established evidence that family social capital, referred to as the bonds
between parents and children reflected in the time and attention that parents spent
interacting with children, monitoring their activities, and promoting their well-being and
social adjustment (Coleman, 1990), is associated with a variety of educational, behavioral,
and emotional outcomes of children and adolescents, including decreased likelihood of
school dropout (Coleman & Hoffer, 1987; Croninger & Lee, 2001), higher educational
aspiration (McNeal, 1999), better academic performance (Coleman, 1988; Coleman &

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Hoffer, 1987; Hao & Bonstead-Bruns, 1998; Valenzuela & Dornbusch, 1994; White &
Glick, 2000), fewer behavior problems (Parcel & Dufur, 2001; Parcel & Menaghan,
1993), and better social and emotional adjustment (Hagan et al., 1996; Lou & Siantz,
1997). Social capital embedded in neighborhoods, termed community social capital,
which consists of social relationships among resident adults and youths reflected by
social networks, norms, trust, a sense of belonging to the community, and civic
engagement (Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 1993), is also found to predict various youth
developmental outcomes such as lower levels of depression (Stevenson, 1998), decreased
youth externalizing behaviors ( Beyers, Bates, Pettit, & Dodge, 2003), better health-
related quality of life (Drukker, Kaplan, Feron & Van Os, 2003), and increased social
competency (Rankin & Quane, 2002). It has been suggested that community social
capital allows parents to “establish norms and reinforce each other’s sanctioning of the
children” (Coleman, 1990: 318); it establishes an extra-familial social network that
provides social control and monitoring functions for children and adolescents living in
the neighborhood (Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, Klebanov, & Sealand, 1993; Coleman, 1990;
Sampson, 1997; Simons et al., 2004).
In addition to family and community social capital, resources inherent in the school
and peer groups also play a significant role in the development of children and
adolescents, although their effects have been less studied. Croniger and Lee’s study (2001)
found that school social capital, reflected by student-teacher relationships (e.g., students’
belief about how teachers are interested in them, value what they say, care about them,
etc.), largely reduced the probability of high school dropout. Drawing on a nationally
representative sample (N=10,465) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent

105
Health (Add Health), Crosnoe (2004) also found that students performed better
academically if they attended schools that had stronger student-teacher bonds. With
regard to the effect of social capital inherent in peer groups, Ream’s study (2005) on
Mexican American achievement found peer social capital to be robust and fungible
resources that bolster the academic performance of secondary school youths, where peer
social capital was assessed by the density, range, intimacy, and trusting level of peer
relationships. Coleman (1961) also suggested in his earlier work that children were
extraordinarily influenced by their peers, and more likely to consider the ties with friends
as more important than that with parents or teachers.

The Role of Children’s Personal Agency
Existing research has typically taken a top-down view of the effects of social capital
on children and adolescents, considering children as passive recipients of social
influences, with little recognition of children’s ability to generate and utilize social
capital in their own right. For example, while examining the effect of family social
capital, research focuses exclusively on how parents’ ability to invest in their parental
practices and their degree of involvement determines the child’s development and well-
being (Coleman, 1988; Dorsey & Forehand, 2003; Putnam, 2000). This ignores the fact
that children, as independent agents, may actively generate, draw on, or negotiate their
own social capital (e.g., initiating interactions with parents, building closer relationships
with parents, or providing supports to parents), thus potentially modifying the way that
social capital works (Becker et al., 1998; Morrow, 1996; Song, 1996; Nestmann & Niepel,
1994). The role of the child’s personal agency has been downplayed in the literature and

106
requires further examination (Morrow, 1999), where child’s personal agency basically
refers to the extent to which children are able to engage in communications and exert
themselves as influential in the social environment (Corsaro, 1997).
A similar concept that has been examined in the literature is perceived self-efficacy.
Perceived self-efficacy refers to beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the
courses of action required to produce given levels of attainment (Bandura, 1997). An
optimistic sense of self-efficacy is important for one to override numerous impediments
to accomplish and achieve positive well-being (Bandura, 1998). Self-efficacy is central to
the mechanism of personal agency, and is the foundation of action. As Bandura (1998)
notes, people have little incentive to act unless they believe they can produce desired
effects by their actions. In this sense, the concept of personal agency used in this study is
interrelated with, but also distinct from self-efficacy in that, it goes beyond the belief or
perception and refers to the actual action of an individual with a specific purpose or
intention. Given the distinction between the two, it is also conceivable that the influences
of what people believe about what they can do would differ from what they actually do.
In addition, personal self-efficacy is also the foundation of collective agency, of which
the shared beliefs in the collective power to produce desired outcomes is a crucial
ingredient (Bandura, 1998). This is particularly relevant to the construction of social
capital in the community context, where the growth of social capital depends largely on
the extent to which people envisage the future of the community, develop or utilize
resources, and put their effort into collective endeavors.
The need to understand the role of children’s agency in the social capital accounts
also derives from one essential feature of social capital as resources embedded in social

107
relationships: its convertability into other forms of capital (e.g., economic capital) that are
critical for people tied in the relationships (Bourdieu, 1986; Lin, 2001; Portes, 1998;
Woolcock, 1998). The convertability of social capital is conditioned by people who
possess it and the places where they attempt its exchange (Ream, 2005). Strong stocks of
social capital by themselves are not sufficient to achieve the transformation into other
forms of capital (Leonard, 2005). Like any other kind of capital, social capital depends on
investment (Lin, 2001). The underlying premise is that, social capital does not
automatically exist in social relationships unless people invest in the relationships to
develop resources; and resources available in the relationships are not automatically
beneficial unless they are mobilized by people to facilitate specific outcomes. In view of
this, personal agency acts as the driving force of the generation, mobilization, and
transformation of social capital.
Drawing on the sociology of childhood that considers children as active agents who
shape the structures and processes around them (James & Prout, 1997) and manifest
agency through interactions in multiple settings (Milkie, 1994), Morrow (1999) has
firmly pinpointed that a more “active” approach in studying social capital is in great need
to incorporate the examination of children’s personal agency. Recent studies have started
to explore the role that children’s personal agency plays in shaping the life experiences of
children and young people through a qualitative approach. Drawing on three studies from
the Families and Social Capital ESRC Research Group Program, Holland, Reynolds and
Weller (2007) demonstrated a variety of ways that children and young people develop
and use social capital to negotiate important life transitions and to construct their
identities, leading to the conclusion that children and young people are active agents in

108
the production and utilization of social capital. Leonard’s (2005) exploration, based on
two projects in Ireland, also demonstrated how children make use of parents’ existing
networks and develop their own social capital in order to gain access to employment
opportunities. The qualitative investigation of children’s personal agency provides an
important foundation for research in this line of inquiry. However, to the author’s
knowledge, to date there is lack of systematic research to quantitatively examine the
influences of personal agency in constructing social capital on the development of
children and adolescents, especially in terms of how it modifies the effects of social
capital in various social contexts.
To fill this gap in the literature and to push research forward in this direction, the
present study employs a mixed-methods design to investigate the role of children’s
personal agency in the functioning of social capital on children’s psychosocial adjustment
in the context of internal migration in mainland China. The study is grounded on the
assumption that, social capital may differ among children who are more or less active in
their social relationships and in utilizing the resources embedded in those relationships,
with concomitant effects on their psychosocial adjustment. Children’s personal agency,
that is, their initiative and actual efforts in constructing social capital across a range of
social contexts, is consequential for the effects of social capital on their psychosocial
adjustment. In view of this, the major hypothesis tested in this study regarding children’s
personal agency is that, to the degree that Chinese migrant children actively generate and
mobilize resources in their social relationships within a range of social contexts, the
effect of those resources on their psychosocial adjustment in each context (each
representing one particular dimension of social capital) will be modified. Specifically,

109
social capital would be more effective in promoting children’s psychosocial adjustment if
children themselves present higher personal agency in constructing social capital.

Methods
Overall Design
This study adopted a mixed method design. It followed the “QUAN + qual”
paradigm, in which the quantitative study served as the dominant design to test the
theoretical model, while results of the quantitative study were interpreted in further depth
through additional explanations and illustrations generated by supplementary qualitative
data (Morse, 2003). Of the five reasons for conducting mixed methods studies identified
by Greene, Caracelli, and Graham (1989), expansion was the aim of using mixed
methods approach in this study. The qualitative analyses were anticipated to elaborate on
and enhance some of the results from the quantitative inquiry. Use of the mixed methods
design, as suggested by Morse (2003), facilitated a more complete and comprehensive
understanding of the phenomenon under investigation.

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Figure 4.1 Hypothesized Model of Social Capital Effects on the Psychosocial Adjustment of Chinese Migrant Children with
Children’s Personal Agency as Moderator
Community
Social Capital
+
+
+
+
Family
Social Capital
School
Social Capital
Peer
Social Capital

Psychosocial

Adjustment
Agency in FSC
Agency in SSC
Agency in PSC
Agency in CSC

Controls

-Sex
-Age
-Length of
Residence in the
City
-School Type
-Family Structure
-Family Human
Capital
-Family Financial
Capital

111
Figure 4.1 presents the conceptual framework tested in the study. Psychosocial
adjustment, assessed by self-esteem, depressive symptoms, hostility, and life satisfaction
was the target outcome, while social capital embedded in the family, school, peer groups,
and community were the major predictor variables. The child’s personal agency, assessed
by children’s initiative and efforts in constructing each dimension of social capital, was
tested as a moderator that potentially modified the effect of that dimension of social
capital on the child’s adjustment. In addition to the social capital variables, several socio-
demographic variables were also included in the conceptual model, including gender, age,
length of residence in the city, school type (public school vs. migrant children’s school),
family structure (living with both parents vs. other family arrangement), family human
capital (i.e., parents’ educational attainment), and family financial capital (i.e., financial
resources used for the household and the child).

Participants and Procedure
Participants of the study were 815 4
th
– 9
th
grade migrant students from 14 schools
located in four administrative districts
*
of Shanghai. The study employed a school-based
multi-stage random sampling method. First, four administrative districts where migrants
were most concentrated were selected. Three of the four districts, Yangpu District,
Pudong District, and Fengxian District, provide education for migrant children in both
public schools and migrant children’s schools, while the fourth district, Xuhui District,
has closed all the migrant children’s schools and accommodated all migrant children in

*
The urban administrative system in China is composed of five levels: province, city, district, street, and
residential committee. The number of districts within a city and the geographic space and population size of
a district vary depending on the size of the city.

112
public schools. Second, a complete list of all public elementary and secondary schools
that accommodate both native and migrant students in each of the four districts, as well as
all migrant children’s schools in the first three districts, were obtained from the
Educational Bureau. In each district, one public elementary school and one public
secondary school were randomly selected from the list of public schools. Likewise, in
each of the first three districts, one elementary and one secondary school was randomly
selected from the migrant children’s schools. Therefore, a total of eight public schools
and six migrant children’s schools were selected into the study. Third, a complete list of
migrant students in the 4
th
–9
th
grades of the public elementary and secondary schools was
obtained from the school officials, and 60 migrant students were randomly selected from
each school. Similarly, 60 migrant students were randomly selected from each of the
migrant children’s schools, based on a complete list of 4
th
–9
th
grade students studying at
those schools. By doing so, a total of 840 migrant students from eight public schools and
six migrant children’s schools were recruited for the study. One parent of each selected
student, who considered himself/herself most knowledgeable of the student, as well as
their family and neighborhood environment, was also invited to participate in the study.
Prior to the administration of surveys, students selected as potential participants were
provided with the child/adolescent assent forms and were asked to take home consent
forms to their parents. Students were eligible to participate in the study if they completed
the child/adolescent assent form and their parents also provided active written consent for
their participation. Students participating in the study completed a paper-and-pencil
survey in their classrooms during a single class period (45-50 min) under the guidance of
trained research assistants. The surveys were identified only by a code number; students’

113
names or any other identifying information were not required. The surveys were provided
in Chinese, and the students were encouraged to ask the research assistants to clarify the
meaning of any question they felt difficult to understand. Parents of the participating
students completed a separate paper-and-pencil survey brought back home by the
students and returned to the research staff in sealed envelopes by the students.
Consequent to the consent/assent procedure, 815 students eventually participated in
the study and completed the student survey, and 772 of their parents completed the parent
survey. Therefore, the final sample used for analysis included 772 pairs of migrant
student and parent participants. Of the 772 migrant children and adolescents, 400 were
male (53.2%) and 352 were female (46.8%). The average age of the student participants
was 12.87 (SD=1.932), with a range from 9 years to 18 years. More than half of the
students (58.5%, N=437) were studying at public schools, while the other 41.5 percent
(N=310) attended migrant children’s schools. A majority of the migrant children (86.2%)
were living with both parents in the household. The educational attainments of the
migrant children’s parents were mostly below the high school level, and the monthly
incomes of these families were mostly less than 3000 Yuan (about $438). Full descriptive
statistics of the sample characteristics were presented in Table 2.1.
Following the quantitative survey, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a
sample of 20 migrant children whose composition was purposefully balanced by gender,
age, and school type. Data from the qualitative interviews were used to complement
findings from the quantitative analysis and to achieve in-depth understanding and
interpretation of the results. The focus of these semi-structured interviews was children’s
experiences of forging relationship ties in their multiple social contexts as a means of

114
developing various dimensions of social capital as well as the impact of those initiatives
and efforts on their psychosocial adjustment. Interviews ranged from 30-45 minutes and
all were audio-taped and transcribed.

Measures
Outcome Variable
Psychosocial Adjustment was assessed as a latent construct composed of four related
adjustment outcomes. Self-esteem was measured by the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale
(RSE) (Rosenberg, 1965), a 10 item instrument that has been used in research with
ethnically diverse samples including immigrant children, which shows good reliability
and validity (Rumbaut, 1994). Respondents were asked to describe the degree to which
the description about self in each item was true for them, such as “On the whole, I am
satisfied with myself” and “I feel that I have a number of good qualities”. Each item was
rated on a 4-point response scale ranging from “not true at all (1)” to “very true (4)”, with
higher scores indicating higher self-esteem. The Cronbach’s alpha of the RSE in this
sample was .671. Depression was measured by the Center for Epidemiological Studies
Depression Scale for Children (CES-DC) (Faulstich et al., 1986), a 20 item instrument
that assesses concurrent depressive symptoms and has been widely used in research
across various populations including immigrant children (Short & Johnston, 1997).
Respondents were asked to describe how much they experienced the symptom stated in
each item during the past week, such as “I was bothered by things that usually don’t
bother me”, “I felt sad”, and “I felt down and unhappy”. Each item was rated on a 4-point
response scale that included “Not at all”, “A little”, “Some”, and “A lot”, with higher

115
scores indicating more depressive symptoms. The Cronbach’s alpha of the CES-DC in
this sample was .827. Hostility was measured by the eight item subscale of hostility
adapted from the Aggression Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1992). Respondents were
asked to rate each item on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “extremely uncharacteristic
of me (1)” to “extremely characteristic of me (5)”, indicating how much the descriptions
of the feelings in the items were characteristic of themselves, such as “I am sometimes
eaten up with jealousy”, and “I am suspicious of overly friendly strangers”. The
Cronbach’s alpha of the hostility scale in this sample was .824. Life satisfaction was
measured by the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) (Diener, 1985), a 5 item instrument
with favorable psychometric properties that assesses global life satisfaction. Participants
rated on a 7-point response scale ranging from “strongly disagree (1)” to “strongly agree
(7)” to indicate how much they agreed with the statement in each item, such as “I am
satisfied with my life”, and “In most ways, my life is close to my ideal”. The Cronbach’s
alpha of the SWLS in this sample was .832. In this study, the standardized sum scores of
the four scales, representing four distinct but correlated adjustment outcomes, were used
as observed indicators to form the latent construct of psychosocial adjustment. The scores
of depression and hostility were reverse coded so that their direction of variation is
consistent with that of self-esteem and life satisfaction.

Social Capital Variables
Measures of social capital in this study drew upon existing indicators used by past
studies, supplemented by scales and questions that tapped into specific
operationalizations of social capital and were adapted to the particular Chinese social

116
context. Family, school, and peer social capital were assessed through children’s report,
while community social capital was assessed through parents’ report.
Family social capital was assessed by the quality of parent-child interaction and
parental monitoring. Parent-child interaction was measured by the Parent-Child
Relationship Inventory (Dixon, Fair, & Bermes, 2004), which assessed the behavioral,
affective and cognitive components of parent-child relationship from the child’s
perspective. The PCRI was composed of 40 items that captured the experience of
children in their relationship to parents in four areas: 1) eight items on their experience of
things that parents are supposed to do for children (e.g., “My parent pays attention to
me”); 2) nine items on their experience of things that children are supposed to do for
parents (e.g., “I do housework for my parent”); 3) eight items on their experience of
things that parents and children are supposed to do together (e.g., “My parent and I play
together”); and 4) 15 items on their experience of the feelings that parents and children
should have for each other and the way they behave with each other (e.g., “We trust each
other”). Participants rated each item on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “never (1)” to
“always (5)”, indicating how often these behaviors and feelings actually occur in their
relationship with parents. The Cronbach’s alpha of the PCRI in this study was .938, and
the Cronbach’s alpha of the four subscales were .749, .740, .756, and .927 respectively,
indicating good internal consistency of the entire scale and each of the subscales. Parental
monitoring was measured by two self-designed scales that incorporated the items used in
previous studies. One scale was composed of eight items asking about how often the
parent involved in their children’s school activities such as attending a school meeting or
talking with the teacher about their children’s school performance, as well as how often

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the parent disciplined children at home such as limiting the time they watch TV or go out
with friends. Each item was rated on a 4-point scale ranging from “never (1)” to “often
(4)”. The Cronbach’s alpha of the scale in this study was .620. The other scale was
composed of four items examining the parent’s knowledge about their children’s after-
school activities, including where they are, who they are with, what they are doing, and
when they are returning home. Each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging
from “never (1)” to “always (5)”. The Cronbach’s alpha of the scale in this study
was .800. The standardized sum scores of the four subscales of the PCRI and the
standardized sum scores of the two parental monitoring scales were used as observed
indicators to form the latent construct of family social capital.
Peer social capital was assessed by the quality of peer relationships supposed to
provide resources for the development of children and adolescents. The Friendship
Qualities Scale (Bukowski, Hoza, & Boivin, 1994) was employed to measure peer
relationships. The scale was composed of 23 items that represented five dimensions of
friendship: companionship (four items; e.g., “My friends and I spent all our free time
together”), conflict (four items; e.g., “I can get into fight with my friend”), help/aid (five
items; e.g., “my friend would help me if I needed it”), security (five items; e.g., “If I have
a problem at school or at home, I can talk to my friend about it”), and closeness (five
items; e.g., “I feel happy when I am with my friend”). Each item was rated on a 5-point
Likert scale that indicated the extent to which the description of the relationship with
friends in the item was true for the participant, ranging from “not true at all (1)” to “very
true (5)”. In this study, the Cronbach’s alpha of the FQS was .872, and the Cronbach’s
alpha of the five subscales were .779, .747, .753, .655(.728), and .790 respectively,

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indicating high internal consistency within each dimension. The standardized sum scores
of these five subscales were then used as observed indicators to form the latent construct
of peer social capital.
School social capital was assessed by school climate and the quality of student-
teacher relationships. School climate was measured by 10 items adapted from the
Inventory of School Climate-Student Version (ISC-S) that assessed multiple dimensions
of school climate, including consistency and clarity of rules, teacher support, student
commitment and achievement orientation, positive and negative peer interactions, and
safety (Brand et al., 2003). Participants rated each item on a 5-point scale ranging from
“not true at all (1)” to “very true (5)”, indicating how much the descriptions in the items
were characteristic of the actual situations of their schools. Sample items of the scale
included “Teachers go out of their way to help students”, “Students work hard for good
grades in classes” and “Students enjoy doing things with each other in school activities”.
The Cronbach’s alpha of the school climate scale in this study was .698. The other
dimension of school social capital, student-teacher relationships, was measured by a
seven item scale which was used to assess school social capital in Croninger and Lee’s
(2001) study. Participants rated each item on a 5-point scale ranging from “not true at all
(1)” to “very true (5)”, indicating how much the descriptions in the items were
characteristic of their experience in their relationships with the teacher. Sample items of
the scale included “The teachers are interested in me” and “The teachers recognize and
praise me when I work hard”. The Cronbach’s alpha of the student-teacher relationship
scale in this study was .857. The standardized sum scores of these two scales were used
as observed indicators to form the latent construct of school social capital

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Community social capital was assessed by four dimensions that captured the
neighborhood characteristics through the responses of parents: social cohesion and trust
in adults (SC & T-A), informal social control (ISC), social cohesion and trust in children
(SC & T-C), and solidarity of the neighborhood. The SC & T-A was measured using a
five item collective efficacy scale developed by Sampson and colleagues (1997), which
examined the bonds and trust among adult residents of the neighborhood. Participants
were asked to describe how much the descriptions in the items were characteristic of the
neighborhood they lived in, such as “People in this neighborhood help each other out”
and “This is a close-knit neighborhood”. Each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale
ranging from “extremely uncharacteristic (1)” to “extremely characteristic (5)”. The
Cronbach’s alpha of the SC & T-A scale in this sample was .631. Since the study focused
on children, a separate seven item SC &T-C scale was used particularly to assess the
bonds and trust among children in the neighborhood, which include items like “Children
in this neighborhood are close-knit”, “Children in this neighborhood play together a lot”,
etc. Questions of this scale had been used previously in a Dutch study on social capital
and children’s health-related quality of life (Drukker, Kaplan, Feron, & Os, 2003).
Similar to the SC & T-A scale, each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale, and the
Cronbach’s alpha of the SC & T-C scale in this sample was .635. Informal social control
was measured by a five item scale that examined the ability and willingness of adult
neighbors to provide monitoring and social control for children living in the
neighborhood. Development of the scale referred to the collective efficacy scale
developed by Sampson and colleagues (1997) and was adapted to the particular Chinese
context. Sample items include “There are a lot of adults around here that my children

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could look up to” and “We watch out for each other’s children in this neighborhood”.
Each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale, and the Cronbach’s alpha of the ISC scale
in this sample was .769. Solidarity of the neighborhood was measured by two questions
asking the participants to describe how strong was their feeling of togetherness with
neighbors and how strong was their sense of belonging to the neighborhood. Each
question was responded to on a 5-point scale ranging from “very weak (1)” to “very
strong (5)”, with higher scores indicating stronger solidarity of the neighborhood. In data
analysis of this study, the standardized sum scores of the social cohesion and trust scales
and the informal social control scale, as well as the standardized score of the two
solidarity items, were used as five observed indicators to form the latent construct of
community social capital.

Personal Agency
There were no existing standard measures of the child’s personal agency. Questions
were developed for use in this study, based on the conceptualization of personal agency
in the literature (Baker-Sperry, 2007; Morrow, 1996, 1999). Semi-structured interviews
with migrant children conducted in the pilot study also helped elicit and refine
appropriate items that assess children’s personal agency. These measures tap into
children’s initiative and actual efforts in generating and mobilizing social capital in a
range of social contexts. The child’s personal agency in constructing family, school, peer,
and community social capital was each assessed by five items asking them how often
they initiated interactions with or offered help to parents, teachers, friends, and neighbors
as a means to forge stronger ties and generate potential resources in those contexts. A

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summary of items for personal agency in each context is presented in Appendix II. Each
item was rated on a 4-point scale ranging from “never (1)” to “often (4)”. The Cronbach’s
alpha of the four agency scales were .781, .787, .803, and .776 respectively. In data
analysis, since personal agency was tested as a moderator, the sum scores of the five
items assessing personal agency in constructing each dimension of social capital were
median-split to create two subgroups characterized by high and low personal agency
respectively.

Socio-demographic Variables
The socio-demographic variables included in the test of hypothesized models
included gender, age, length of residence in the city, school type, family structure, family
human capital, and family financial capital. Gender (1=female, 0=male), age (in years),
and school type (1=public school, 0=migrant children’s school) were self-explanatory.
Length of residence was measured by the number of months that the children have lived
in the city. Family structure was examined by a binary variable (1=children living with
both parents, 0=other family arrangement); it was included given the assumption that the
physical presence of both parents would influence the parental involvement in the
children (Coleman, 1988). Family human capital was assessed by parents’ educational
attainments, which were expected to influence the cognitive environment within a home
(Coleman, 1988). In this study, father and mother’s educational levels were reported by
children on seven categories ranging from “didn’t go to or didn’t graduate from
elementary school (1)” to “university graduate or higher (7)”. This is a common
operationalization of human capital in prior empirical studies (Coleman & Hoffer, 1987;

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Teachman et al., 1996, 1997). Family financial capital was assessed by three indicators:
monthly household income, household equipment, and poverty index. Monthly household
income, referring to income from all sources in the household, was reported by parents on
12 categories ranging from “lower than RMB 100 Yuan (1)” (about $12.5) to “More than
RMB 10000 Yuan (12)” (about $1,250). Household equipment was measured by asking
parents to indicate whether their family possessed electronic items such as refrigerator,
washing machine, air conditioning, and a computer. The number of electronics that the
family possesses was representative of the family’s economic condition. The response to
each item was dummy coded and the sum of responses to all items (ranging from 0 to 10)
composed the household equipment score. The poverty index included three questions
asking the parents how difficult it had been in the past year to purchase furniture or
household equipment that needed to be replaced, to buy food their children should have,
and obtain medical care for their children. Participants rated each question on a 5-point
scale ranging from “very difficult (1)” to “not difficult at all (5)”, with higher scores
indicating a lower poverty level. The standardized scores of the monthly household
income, the household equipment, and the poverty index were used as three observed
indicators to form the latent construct of family financial capital. Please refer to
Appendix I for a complete list of latent constructs in the study and corresponding
measures of observed variables for each.

Data Analysis
Structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted using MPlus 5.0 to test the
hypothesized models. SEM permits the use of latent constructs composed of multiple

123
observed variables and allows for estimating the relationships among latent constructs
while providing explicit estimates of measurement errors to increase the accuracy of
analysis results (Byrne, 2001). Moreover, it permits the simultaneous estimation of direct
and indirect paths, estimating each path after the effects of all other paths are accounted
for. SEM also offers a multiple-group approach that enables simultaneous model fitting
for two (or more) samples at a time and allows across-group constraints to test the
invariance of factor loadings, path coefficients, intercepts, variances, and covariance,
which renders it an ideal method to test moderation or interaction effects. These features
of SEM make it an especially well-suited technique for this study, given the hypothesized
moderating effect of personal agency on the associations between each dimension of
social capital and the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children. The study followed
the two-step approach to SEM (Kline, 2005), testing the measurement model at the first
step to establish a statistically reliable measure for each latent construct, and then testing
the structural model at the second step to examine the multivariate relationships among
latent constructs. The study did not perform any particular analysis for missing data
because no one study variable had more than 5% missing data. Considering the adequate
sample size, the small percent of missing data did not seriously distort analysis results.

Results
Test of Measurement Model
Invariance of factor structures of the latent constructs (i.e., family social capital,
school social capital, peer social capital, community social capital, family human capital,
family financial capital, and the psychosocial adjustment) across the high and low

124
personal agency groups were first evaluated before proceeding to test the hypothesized
structural models. Multiple fit indices were used to assess the goodness of the model,
including: 1) Chi Square ( 
2
), the likelihood ratio test statistic, where an associated
probability value showing non-significant 
2
represents a closer fit of the hypothesized
model to the perfect fit (Bollen, 1989). However, due to the sensitivity of the likelihood
ratio test to sample size, it is not uncommon for a well-fitting hypothesized model to
yield a significant 
2
if the sample size is large (Byrne, 2001); 2) the Comparative Fit
Index (CFI), which compares the performance of the specified model to the performance
of a baseline independence model, where values above 0.90 denote a good model fit
(Bentler, 1990); and 3) the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA; Steiger,
1990), where values less than 0.05 indicate a “close fit”, values between 0.05 and 0.08
suggest a “reasonable fit”, and values above 0.1 denote a “poor fit” (Kline, 2005).
As presented in Table 4.1, the multiple-group measurement model with factor
loadings constrained to be equal across high and low personal agency groups provided
good fits to the data with CFIs greater than .90 and RMSEAs smaller than .05. In each of
the four models testing the effect of one particular dimension of social capital, all
observed variables were significantly loaded on the corresponding latent constructs in the
expected directions, suggesting that the selected indicators reasonably represented the
underlying constructs in a statistically reliable manner, and the factor structures were the
same for both groups. The standardized factor loadings of indicators on each latent
construct were all greater than the commonly adopted criteria of acceptable loadings
(i.e., .30) for keeping certain indicators (Agnew, 1991).

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Table 4.1 Fits of Measurement and Structural Models

Model Measurement Model

2
df p CFI RMSEA
FSC Model 323.668 186 <.001 .946 .045
SSC Model 136.643 88 <.001 .971 .039
PSC Model 198.476 132 <.001 .965 .037
CSC Model 218.882 160 <.01 .973 .032
Structural Model

2
df p CFI RMSEA
FSC Model 504.084 309 <.001 .930 .042
SSC Model 278.580 174 <.001 .945 .040
PSC Model 380.358 237 <.001 .931 .041
CSC Model 417.531 277 <.001 .941 .037

Test of Structural Model
Of central interest in the study is whether the effects of family, school, peer, and
community social capital on the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children vary while
children exert differential levels of personal agency in generating and mobilizing each
dimension of social capital. Following the multiple-group approach in SEM, I first
evaluated the fits of alternative structural models with various degrees of constraints, in
order to identify the best fitting model and examine the invariance of path coefficients. A
summary of the comparison of model fits is presented in Table 4.2.
According to the comparison of model fits, while testing the moderating effect of
children’s personal agency in modifying the influences of family, school, and peer social
capital, the best fitting models were the ones that allowed free estimates of the paths
linking social capital to children’s psychosocial adjustment. For example, in the models
testing the effect of family social capital, model 1 exhibited a fully-constrained model
with all factor loadings and structural effects being equal across the high and low
personal agency groups. Based on model 1, model 2 released the path from family social

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Table 4.2 Comparison of the Fit of Alternative Models (Multiple Group Analysis
with Children’s Personal Agency as Moderator)

Model Model Description 
2
df 
2
df p
1 Fully constrained, with all factor
loadings and structural effects
equal across groups

510.408

310

Personal
Agency
in FSC 2 As model 1, free the path from
FSC to PA

504.084

309

6.324

1

.012
1 Fully constrained, with all factor
loadings and structural effects
equal across groups

288.797

175

Personal
Agency
in SSC 2 As model 1, free the path from
SSC to PA

278.580

174

10.217

1

.001
1 Fully constrained, with all factor
loadings and structural effects
equal across groups

387.486

238

Personal
Agency
in PSC 2 As model 1, free the path from
PSC to PA

380.358

237

7.128

1

.008
1 Fully constrained, with all factor
loadings and structural effects
equal across groups

417.531

277

Personal
Agency
in CSC 2 As model 1, free the path from
CSC to PA

414.769

276

2.762

1

.097

capital to psychosocial adjustment, allowing free estimates of the path coefficient in each
group. The significant decrease of chi square value from model 1 to model 2 ( 
2
= 6.324,
df = 1, p<.05) suggested that allowing the path from family social capital to
psychosocial adjustment to vary across groups would improve the overall fit of the
multiple-group structural model. Similar results were detected in the models testing
school and peer social capital effects. These indicated that the effects of family, school,
and peer social capital were significantly different across the two groups of migrant
children with higher versus lower levels of personal agency. However, while testing the
moderating effect of personal agency in the neighborhood context, the best fitting model
was the one that fully constrained all factor loadings and structural effects. That is to say,
the effect of community social capital on children’s psychosocial adjustment remained

127
the same regardless of the child’s personal agency in actively constructing community
social capital.
Table 4.1 presents the fits of the final selected structural models, each of which tests
the moderating effect of one agency variable in modifying the effects of a particular
dimension of social capital. The models all provided good fits to the data with CFIs
greater than .90 and RMSEAs lower than .05. The standardized and unstandardized
coefficients of all structural paths linking social capital to psychosocial adjustment in
both high and low personal agency groups were presented in Table 4.3.
As hypothesized, the child’s personal agency in generating and mobilizing social capital
moderated the effects of family, school, and peer social capital on their psychosocial
adjustment. Family social capital exhibited stronger positive effect on psychosocial
adjustment for children showing higher levels of personal agency in constructing social
capital in their family spheres (B = .602, p <.001) than for those showing lower levels of
personal agency (B = .355, p <.01). School social capital also showed stronger
association with psychosocial adjustment for children from the high personal agency
group (B = .833, p <.001) than for those from the low personal agency group (B = .450, p
<.01). Likewise, the effect of peer social capital was more pronounced within the group
of migrant children who presented higher personal agency (B = .728, p <.001) versus the
lower agency group (B = .364, p <.01). Nevertheless, the effect of community social
capital on children’s psychosocial adjustment was not contingent on the level of
children’s personal agency. In other words, the effects of community social capital
remained the same for children with higher or lower personal agency in generating and
mobilizing social resources in the neighborhood setting (B = .279, p <.001).

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Table 4.3 Standardized Total Effects of Major Predictor Variables on Children’s Psychosocial Adjustment in both
High and Low Personal Agency Groups

Psychosocial Adjustment
FSC Model SSC Model PSC Model CSC Model

Major Predictor Variables
Agency
Low
Agency
High
Agency
Low
Agency
High
Agency
Low
Agency
High
Agency
Low
Agency
High
FSC .355** .602*** - - - - - -
SSC - - .450** .833*** - - - -
PSC - - - - .364** .728*** - -
CSC - - - - - - .279** .279**
Human Capital .002 .035 .034 .014 .033 .034 .012 .013
Financial Capital .069 .129 .101 .136 .131 .134 .209 .233
Gender .063 .077 .108 .122 .093 .121 .134 .138
Age -.010 -.014 -.051 -.107 -.110 -.088 -.086 -.079
School Type .284 .300 .216 .251 .236 .361 .234 .224
Family Structure .117 .119 .081 .059 .133 .098 .118 .117
Res. Length .080 .069 .130 .102 .103 .099 .143 .143
R
2
24.9% 45.2% 32.3% 53.9% 34.4% 31.8% 24.4% 24.3%

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Of the socio-demographic variables, effects of family human capital and financial
capital were mediated by family social capital for both high and low personal agency
groups, in the model testing family social capital effect. Gender and school type also
influenced children’s psychosocial adjustment through the mediating role of family social
capital; being male and attending public school were associated with higher family social
capital, which, in turn, led to better psychosocial adjustment. In the model testing school
social capital, effects of gender, age, and school type were all mediated by school social
capital within the groups of migrant children with either high or low personal agency.
Length of residence in the city was also positively associated with better adjustment
outcomes. In the model testing peer social capital, only the effect of school type was
mediated by peer social capital for both high and low agency groups in the same direction
as in the above two models. In addition, living with both parents was associated with
better psychosocial adjustment. Finally, in the model testing community social capital,
effects of family financial capital and length of residence in the city were mediated by
community social capital, with wealthier financial resources and longer length of urban
residence associated with higher community social capital, which led to more favorable
outcomes. Living with both parents and attending public schools were also associated
with better psychosocial adjustment. The standardized total effects of socio-demographic
variables on children’s psychosocial adjustment for both groups of migrant children with
higher or lower personal agency within each model were presented in Table 4.3. The total
variances of children’s psychosocial adjustment explained by each model testing a
particular dimension of social capital were also reported.

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Results of Qualitative Analyses
The semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 20 migrant children were
conducted to gather information about children’s own experiences of their willingness,
efforts, and rewards in generating and mobilizing social capital in their various social
contexts. This information was essentially used to facilitate a more complete
understanding of the patterns of children’s personal agency as well as its impact. To
complement the quantitative findings, a major research question that drove the qualitative
analysis was why children’s personal agency successfully magnified the effects of family,
school, and peer social capital, but was not effective in the community context. Analysis
of the qualitative data were organized around two categories: 1) patterns of children’s
personal agency, including their willingness and actual efforts to generate and mobilize
social capital in the family, school, peer, and community contexts; and 2) impacts of
children’s personal agency, either on enhancing the stock of social capital or on their
psychosocial well-being. The themes emerging under each category were elaborated as
below.

Patterns of Children’s Personal Agency
This group of migrant children expressed a general willingness to forge stronger ties
with their parents, teachers, and friends. They considered these relationships important to
them, and most of them also tried to make special efforts to strengthen these relationships.
Their practice of personal agency was reflected in the following quotes (Note that the
interviewed children were coded as MC1, 2…20, where MC denotes migrant children).

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Interviewer: “Do you feel the relationship with parents important to you?”
MC19: “Of course very important. No matter what, parents are your strongest
back-up.”
Interviewer: “Have you ever tried to do anything to get closer with your
parents?”
MC1: “Yeah…sometimes they were too busy and they forgot their birthday.
Then I prepared a birthday party for them, and they were very happy.”

Interviewer: “Do you feel the relationship with teachers important to you?”
MC1: “Yes, very.”
Interviewer: “Have you ever tried to do anything to get closer with your
teacher?”
MC1: “I go to talk with my teacher during class break. Sometimes if I know
that the teacher plans to do something, I’d go to ask if I can help.”

Interviewer: “Do you feel the relationship with friends important to you?”
MC19: “Very important, because friends are not the same as parents and
teachers. There are things you can’t tell parents or teachers, but you tell
friends.”
Interviewer: “Have you ever tried to do anything to get closer with your
friends?”
MC19: “To get closer with friends?...I hope they tell me anything that trouble
them, and I do the same, and we will. I help them sort out the troubles, then
they won’t feel that bad. If I see my friend unhappy, I must go to ask what has
happened.”

Some kids expressed their willingness to develop stronger relationships in these
contexts, but did not really put in much effort because they could not find a manageable
way to do so.

Interviewer: “Have you ever tried to do anything to get closer with your
teacher?”
MC18: “I did think about that, but didn’t know what to do.”

On the other hand, these children cared much less about their relationships with
neighbors and rarely took any action to strengthen those relationships or to improve the
neighborhood. An eighth grade migrant girl described her unfamiliarity with neighbors:

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Interviewer: “How long have you been living in this neighborhood?”
MC19: “Two years and a half.”
Interviewer: “Are you familiar with your neighbors?”
MC19: “No, I don’t know them.”
Interviewer: “You don’t know them at all?”
MC19: “Because we live in this kind of apartment building, usually we just go
home and close the door, we don’t have any communication.”
Interviewer: “Would you like to see any change in your relationships with
neighbors?”
MC19: “I hope to get a bit more familiar with them.”
Interviewer: “Do you think about doing something to get more familiar with
them?”
MC19: “No, I don’t have any plan.”

A fifth grade migrant girl also shared similar feelings of isolation and
unwillingness to build a stronger relationship with neighbors:

Interviewer: “Have you ever tried to help your neighbors?”
MC19: “No.”
Interviewer: “Have you ever thought about doing something to get closer with
your neighbors?”
MC19: “No, I haven’t thought about that”
Interviewer: “Is there a reason that you didn’t do anything or didn’t think
about doing anything?”
MC19: “Well...It’s not like my hometown here. In my hometown, I always go
to play at my neighbors’ home, it’s more open and I often have dinner at my
neighbor’s home. Here in Shanghai, I feel like, compared to my hometown, I
feel like there is a river, you can’t cross that river. I really don’t feel like going
to my neighbors’ home. I prefer staying at home by myself.”

The narratives of children’s own experience quoted above indicated a general pattern
of their actively exercising personal agency in the family, school, and peer contexts,
whereas a more passive mode was featured in the community setting. Discrepancies
between children’s willingness and actual efforts to strengthen social relationships also

133
existed in some cases, mainly attributed to their lack of knowledge on how to make that
endeavor.

Impacts of Children’s Personal Agency
According to children’s narratives, when they made specific efforts to get closer to
their parents, teachers, and friends, they did oftentimes enjoy the result of their efforts:
improved or strengthened relationship ties.

MC6: “I feel that Dad and Mom are tired. So I rarely go out on Saturday
and Sunday. I stay at home doing chores for them. It is summer now, so
you have to wash your clothes every day. I stay at home washing clothes
on weekends, and then I do my homework. I rarely go out, sometimes in
the afternoon I play outside for a while, but just a while, then I come
back to cook. I feel much closer with my parents than before.”

These children also experienced some benefits or rewards of those efforts directly on
their psychosocial well-being.

MC1: “When I was not happy, I went to talk to the teacher, and the
teacher always had a variety of ways to tell me things. I’d love to listen
to her, and I’d feel much better.”

MC20: “If I have any problem I will talk with my friends. I always go to
friends as I am unhappy. This would make me feel relieved a lot.”

Nevertheless, the impacts of children’s practice of personal agency were not always
desirable. Although children’s efforts in forging stronger relationship ties with parents,
teachers, and friends were usually rewarded with an improvement in those relationships
and enhancement of their well-being, their experiences in the neighborhood setting

134
exhibited otherwise. A story told by a 7
th
grade migrant girl presented one such
interesting case. She had once tried to plant some flowers in the neighborhood in order to
improve the environment, but no one in the neighborhood appreciated her good will and
agentic efforts, and the eventual death of the flowers made her feel deeply frustrated and
upset, which discouraged any of her further intent of acting for the good of the
neighborhood.

MC4: “I will never try to do anything for the neighborhood again. It’s a
waist of energy. No one ever appreciated what you did. It’s not that I
haven’t tried. I did try. I planted twelve pots of flowers and was hoping to
green the neighborhood. But no longer than one week they all died. They
treated my flowerpots as trash can. The pots were full of trash, the peels of
watermelon. I felt so sorry for the flowers. I felt that there’s no way to
change these people. I thought planting the flowers would make the
environment better and would make me and others happy. Seeing what
they did, I will never want to do anything like that again…I was not only
frustrated. I was sad and angry. I was frustrated because they didn’t
understand me. I was sad because the flowers were so poor to fade that
way.”

The quotes above suggested that, children’s practice of personal agency did impact
on the stock of social capital or on their psychosocial well-being. Nevertheless, feedbacks
or rewards to children’s agentic behaviors also played an important role in determining
the influences of their agency or the influences of social contexts on their psychosocial
well-being as a result of their agency. Although children’s personal agency in the family,
school, and peer contexts generally brought to them desirable outcomes, their agency in
the community setting did not work successfully for their benefit, probably due to
negative structural or cultural factors in the neighborhood environment.

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In summary, results of the qualitative analysis reaffirmed the proposition that
children were indeed active agents in the formation of social capital. Children’s personal
agency was practiced more in the proximal contexts of the family, school, and peer
groups. In the larger context of neighborhood, however, children were less active in
exercising personal agency, mostly because they do not consider relationships in the
neighborhood as so important as in other social arenas. Although the impacts of
children’s personal agency were generally favorable in the family, school, and peer
contexts, children experienced negative impacts of their practice of agency in the
community setting, which discouraged their further intent and action in that particular
context.

Discussion
Drawing upon a sample of migrant children in mainland China and adopting a
mixed-methods design, this study represents a pioneer effort to challenge the theoretical
tradition of social capital by acknowledging the role of child’s personal agency in
shaping the function of social capital. It is unique and innovative in that, rather than
merely examining how the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children is influenced by
their immediate social contexts, this study focuses on how children’s personal agency,
that is, their initiative and actual efforts in generating and mobilizing social capital
embedded in these social contexts, modifies the function of social capital. The
quantitative findings accompanied by children’s personal stories brought valuable
insights and depth to the study and allowed for a richer understanding of the interplay
between children and social contexts.

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Results of the study underline the significance of children’s personal agency in
magnifying the effects of social capital in the family, school, and peer contexts. The
models testing family, school, and peer social capital effects with the child’s personal
agency as moderator all suggest that when children present higher degrees of personal
agency in developing social capital in a particular context, the effect of social capital on
their adjustment is much stronger than it is for children who are less active in initiating
interactions and building resources in that social context. Interpretation of the results can
be threefold. First, it is possibly due to the fact that children who actively develop or
mobilize resources in their various social relationships are those who think these
relationships are important to them. Once they have taken specific actions to strengthen a
particular social relationship, they tend to be more conscious about social resources
embedded in that relationship; they may also develop higher expectations of what those
resources might bring to them, thus generally increasing the potential influences of social
capital on their well-being.
Second, children who present higher personal agency are most possibly those who
hold stronger perceived self-efficacy as well. As Bandura (1998) put it, people have little
incentive to act unless they believe they can produce desired effects by their actions. In
line with this, children who are more active in building social capital might be those who
hold a stronger belief that they will be of some impact on the social contexts thus
adjusting the contextual influences on their well-being. Therefore, it is through this strong
efficacy belief or the sense of mastery and power that personal agency facilitates the
positive effects of social capital on children’s psychosocial outcomes.

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Third, children who actively invest in relationship ties in the family, school, and peer
groups are probably those who have benefited more from those relationship ties through
their earlier experiences. In this case, social capital has had a greater impact on their
psychosocial functioning and has actually become a motivation for their initiative and
efforts in continuously building social connections for their benefits. This is evident in
the children’s narratives about how they tried to forge stronger ties and how their efforts
paid off (e.g. MC6). In addition, rewarding earlier experiences may also enhance the
children’s self-efficacy, given that mastery experiences provide one of the most effective
ways of instilling a strong sense of efficacy (Bandura, 1998). As such, the
aforementioned mechanism of self-efficacy effect also partly explained the positive
interaction between personal agency and social capital in promoting children’s
psychosocial adjustment.
The failure of this study to discover a moderating effect of children’s personal
agency in modifying the influences of community social capital as originally
hypothesized merits particular attention. It mirrors the special features of neighborhood
processes in shaping the adjustment and well-being of migrant children. It also stimulates
further inquiry on why the child’s personal agency does not function the same way in the
community setting as it does in the family, school, and peer groups. Reasons of this
unexpected finding might be twofold. First, according to the children’s narratives,
maintaining connections with neighbors are not as important as forging stronger ties with
parents, teachers, and friends. Migrant children generally devote less effort in generating
or mobilizing social resources in the neighborhood setting, resulting in little variation in
their personal agency in constructing community social capital. This partially explains

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why the effect of community social capital is not significantly different between the two
subgroups of migrant children characterized by higher versus lower degrees of personal
agency. The general pattern of caring little about relationships with neighbors and
making almost no efforts in the community setting as revealed by the qualitative data
provides support to this interpretation. Second, unlike the family, school, and peer
contexts, investment in developing resources in the neighborhood setting may not
produce immediate positive rewards for children who have made those efforts. Failure to
receive positive feedback to their efforts in generating social capital may foster in
children a negative or indifferent attitude towards the community, thus reducing the
significance of community for children and counteracting the supposedly stronger
positive effect of community social capital on children’s psychosocial adjustment. The
story told by the middle school migrant girl quoted above (i.e. MC4) clearly explains this
possibility. This case presents a vivid illustration on how the failure of receiving positive
responses to the child’s efforts in exercising her good will to improve the neighborhood
environment lead to deep frustration and seriously discourage any further intent and
action to make a change for the community. It is conceivable that receiving positive
responses in the proximal settings of family, school, and peer groups when children make
special efforts to strengthen those relationships would be easier and more prompt.
However, when it comes to the community setting, it involves the ideology of residents
and the cultural tradition of the neighborhood, which makes it more difficult for children
to experience a reward to their active behaviors. Instead, they are more likely to
encounter ignorance or rejection, thus degrading the potential of community in promoting
their psychological well-being. Especially for migrant children who have been

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experiencing exclusion and discrimination in the urban environment due to their
marginalized status, failing to receive favorable feedback to their active efforts in getting
involved in the neighborhood may easily discourage their further engagement in
community affairs, rendering them in an even more powerless position.
This also relates back to the concept of self-efficacy. Although the influence of what
children believe they can do is different from that of what they actually do, self efficacy
and personal agency are not independent of one another. When children’s efforts are not
rewarded in the expected way, their self-efficacy tend to decrease as well, which will
discourage their future initiative and actions. This negative self-efficacy, that is, the doubt
of their ability to make any positive change in the neighborhood, would deter the
potential effects of community resources on their psychosocial adjustment. Moreover, it
would deter the potential of individual self-efficacy being aggregated to build a collective
efficacy at the community level, which, in turn, decreases the possibility of enhancing the
stock of community social capital through heightened collective efficacy. In addition,
self-efficacy works best when it is congruent with the social system (Bandura, 1998).
Therefore, when the community system does not applaud individual efficacy, the
potential effects of personal agency is likely to be undermined.
In summary, the findings of this study add to our knowledge about how children’s
personal agency in generating and mobilizing social capital embedded in various social
contexts modifies the function of social capital on their psychosocial well-being. The
findings indicate an important role that children themselves play in magnifying the
effects of family, school, and peer social capital on their psychosocial adjustment,
through actively developing resources within those social contexts. Children’s personal

140
agency in the neighborhood setting, however, does not make a significant difference in
the functioning of community social capital, which invokes further inquiry. These results
should be interpreted in light of several limitations of the study. First, with a cross-
sectional study design, the study could not rigorously establish causal relationships
between social capital and the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children. There
remains the possibility that better psychosocial adjustment of migrant children results in
higher levels of social capital, rather than vice versa. Second, participants of the study are
selected from elementary and junior high school students. This excludes the large
population of migrant children who could not attend school in the city due to structural
barriers or financial hardship. Therefore, the sample selection criteria employed in this
study restricts the generalizability of research findings to the entire population of migrant
children. Third, measures of the child’s personal agency were developed specifically for
the study, and their validity and reliability has yet to be reassured by replicated use in
future empirical studies.

Implications for Theory, Practice, Policy, and Future Research
Despite the limitations noted above, the current study has multiple implications for
the advancement of theory and for the design and delivery of social service programs and
social policy. It also points out promising directions for future research. First, the study
advances social capital theory by taking into account the children’s personal agency in
generating and mobilizing social capital as a potential modifier of social capital effects,
which fills a knowledge gap in the social capital literature. Studying children’s personal
agency is particularly meaningful in the Chinese social context because individual

141
behavior has traditionally been more heavily regulated by social obligations than is the
case in western societies. Moreover, the initiative and efforts in constructing social
capital would be especially important for migrant children in China, who have limited
access to resources in their various social contexts due to marginalized status.
Nevertheless, although first tested in mainland China, the role of children’s personal
agency is not confined to the Chinese context, and future examination of this concept in
the western contexts will potentially fortify its cross-cultural validity and applicability.
Second, the salient effect of the child’s personal agency in magnifying the function
of social capital on their psychosocial well-being has important implications for social
work practice with the vulnerable population of migrant children. Helping individuals
adapt to the society and changing society to meet the needs of individuals are the two
parallel approaches in social work for promoting the welfare of the most vulnerable
sectors of society (Marsiglia & Kulis, 2008). Findings of this research suggest an
integration of these two approaches by empowering individuals to make positive changes
in their social environment as a means to facilitate their adaptation to the society. In
consideration of the role of children’s personal agency in magnifying the effects of
family, school, and peer social capital, youth service programs should employ
empowerment strategies that encourage and enable migrant children to make investment
in their various social relationships, thus developing and mobilizing social resources that
will work for their benefit. As Bourdieu notes in typologizing the forms of capital, social
capital is something that must be continuously worked for; it is “the product of
investment strategies, individual or collective, consciously or unconsciously aimed at
establishing or reproducing social relationships that are directly useable in the short or

142
long term” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 251). This should serve as an underlying philosophy that
guides the development of service programs for promoting the adjustment and well-being
of migrant children. Given the research finding that children do not devote much effort in
constructing social capital mostly because they do not know how, cultivating children’
skills in relationship building should be one focus of youth service programs. Moreover,
social service professionals should also educate or provide support for parents, teachers
and neighborhood adults to continue their investment in each social arena, which all
significantly contribute to improving children’s psychosocial well-being.
On the other hand, given the failure of children’s personal agency in modifying the
effect of community social capital, possibly due to the less positive feedback that children
receive as a reward to their active efforts, social service programs should also educate
neighborhood residents on the importance and skills of respecting and responding to
children’s initiative in being an active citizen. Increasing the awareness of any efforts in
developing resources at the neighborhood level will not only enrich the stock of
community social capital, but make more effective use of available social resources. In
addition, youth service professionals may also provide training programs that foster
stronger efficacy beliefs of children, which may not only facilitate children’s behaviors to
reshape the influences of social contexts on their well-being, but contributes to the
formation of collective agency, the group action based on shared beliefs in their
collective power to produce desired outcomes (Bandura, 1998). This collective
efficacious force, coupled with a supportive neighborhood environment, will lead to the
growth of community social capital and the improvement of child well-being.

143
Third, this study informs policymakers of the need to foster a community atmosphere
that enhances the general awareness and embraces the active engagement of children and
young people in developing community social capital. Indifference of neighborhood
residents in responding to the initiative and behaviors of migrant youth might deter the
positive effect of community resources. Therefore, at the structural level, it will be
beneficial to create a culture and system that recognize and reward individual efforts for
public good, especially those devoted by marginalized populations. Allocating more
resources to build a more favorable neighborhood environment that facilitates
interactions among resident adults and children will increase the consciousness of people
in making possible investment in their community and in responding appropriately to the
efforts of others. This will eventually empower individuals, and enlarge the potential of
the community to improve individual well-being.
Last, this study also points out several directions for future research. First, measures
of the child’s personal agency used in this study are not standardized scales, but
questions developed specifically for the study. The validity and reliability of this
measurement instrument will need to be reassured by future empirical studies that draw
upon different samples of child and adolescent population in China and in other socio-
cultural contexts. Second, future research may include the measure of self-efficacy along
with personal agency in order to examine the mechanisms by which these two distinct but
related concepts operate on children’s psychosocial adjustment. Personal agency and self-
efficacy may reinforce one another, and may interact with each other or combine to
influence the functioning of social capital. Third, the examination of children’s personal
agency in modifying the function of social capital on child’s psychosocial adjustment

144
should be applied to other developmental outcomes and in other socio-cultural contexts,
so as to fortify its universal validity and applicability. A further step in this line of inquiry
would be developing cross-cultural studies that explore how children’s agency in
negotiating with their social environment might reshape the contextual impact on their
well-being in various socio-cultural settings.

Conclusion
This study represents a pioneer effort to examine the role of children’s personal
agency in generating and mobilizing social capital embedded in multiple social contexts
as a potential modifier of the social capital effects. It identifies the significant role that
children’s personal agency plays in magnifying the positive effects of family, school, and
peer social capital on their psychosocial adjustment. It also reveals some particular
features of the neighborhood processes where the child’s personal agency is not effective
in reshaping the influences of the community context. Knowledge of children’s potential
in managing the impact of social capital suggests empowering children through service
programs to encourage and enable their investment in constructing social capital, thus
making more effective use of social resources. It also suggests fostering a community
culture that facilitates civic engagement, which consequently facilitates the effective
functioning of social capital. Future empirical studies that examine the role of children’s
personal agency in affecting a broader range of outcomes and in other socio-cultural
contexts will continue building scientific knowledge to inform the practice and policy
agenda.

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Chapter 5 Conclusions and Implications

This dissertation research applies the social capital theoretical framework to
investigate how social capital embedded in the family, school, peer, and community
influences the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children in mainland China.
Harnessing an ecological perspective to incorporate multiple dimensions of social capital
into one conceptual framework, this study constitutes a pioneer effort to examine how
multiple dimensions of social capital contribute to the psychosocial adjustment of
Chinese migrant children independently, jointly, and interactively. Moreover, rather than
merely examining how the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children is shaped by their
immediate social contexts, this study acknowledges the role of children’s personal agency
in generating and mobilizing social capital within each social context as a potential
modifier of the social capital effects. Drawing on a sample of 772 pairs of migrant
children and their parents living in Shanghai, China, this dissertation is composed of
three interrelated studies, each responding to one of the major research questions
addressed by the research: 1) How do family, school, peer and community social capital
influence the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children in mainland China as they
exist simultaneously? 2) What are the mechanisms by which various dimensions of social
capital interact with each other to influence children’s psychosocial adjustment? And 3)
How does children’s personal agency in generating and mobilizing each dimension of
social capital moderate the effect of that type of social capital on their psychosocial
adjustment? Major findings of each study are summarized below.

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Summary of Major Research Findings
Study 1 of the dissertation research contributes to existing knowledge of social
capital effects by incorporating social capital embedded in a range of social contexts (i.e.,
family, school, peer and community) into one conceptual framework, allowing
simultaneous examination of multiple dimensions of social capital as they relate to the
psychosocial adjustment of migrant children. As hypothesized, all four dimensions of
social capital significantly influence the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children,
either directly or indirectly through mediating pathways. Of these four dimensions,
school social capital shows the strongest effect on children’s psychosocial adjustment.
Community social capital does not present a significant direct effect on child’s
adjustment; however, its effects are completely mediated by family, school, and peer
social capital. Again, the indirect effect of community social capital appears to be the
strongest through the mediating pathway of school social capital.
Study 2 takes one step further by examining the interactions among various
dimensions of social capital as they influence the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese
migrant children. It reveals the conditional nature of social capital effects by
demonstrating the interaction between family and community social capital, where higher
levels of community social capital enhances the positive effect of family social capital on
children’s psychosocial adjustment. For children with higher levels of community social
capital, family social capital appears to be the strongest predictor of their psychosocial
adjustment, while for children with lower levels of community social capital, school
social capital shows the greatest importance in their psychosocial adjustment.
Furthermore, within the group of migrant children with lower levels of community social

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capital, a similar booster effect is also found between family and school social capital. In
summary, this study unveils the intricate mechanism by which multiple dimensions of
social capital interact with each other to influence the adjustment and well-being of
migrant children.
Study 3 attempts to challenge the top-down view in the social capital literature,
which considers children as passive recipients of social influences rather than active
agents. Instead, it recognizes the significant role that children’s personal agency plays in
modifying the effects of social capital on their psychosocial well-being. Adopting a
mixed-methods design wherein the major quantitative findings are complemented by
children’s narratives of their own experiences through semi-structured interviews, this
study suggests that children’s personal agency in generating and mobilizing social capital
across their immediate social contexts is essential in determining how social capital might
operate on their psychosocial adjustment. Specifically, children’s personal agency in
constructing family, school, and peer social capital significantly magnifies the positive
effects of each of these dimensions of social capital. However, children’s personal agency
in the neighborhood setting does not make a significant difference in the impact of
community social capital.
Overall, this dissertation research provides a rich understanding of the mechanism by
which social capital functions and leads to the following conclusions: Social capital
embedded in the family, school, peer and community significantly influence the
psychosocial adjustment of migrant children in mainland China independently, jointly,
and interactively. Moreover, children’s personal agency in generating and mobilizing

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social capital plays a significant role in magnifying the positive effects of family, school,
and peer social capital, but not in modifying the function of community social capital.

Study Limitations
There are several limitations inherent in the dissertation research that requires
caution while interpreting its results. First, with a cross-sectional design, this study could
not rigorously establish causality in the association between social capital and the
psychosocial adjustment of migrant children. There remains the possibility that better
psychosocial adjustment of migrant children results in higher levels of social capital,
rather than vice versa. Second, participants of the study are selected from elementary and
junior high school students. This excludes migrant children not currently enrolled in
school. As a matter of fact, there is a large population of migrant children who could not
attend school in the city due to structural barriers or financial hardship. Therefore, the
sample selection criteria employed in this study restricts the generalizability of research
findings to the entire population of migrant children. Third, the present study does not
include a comparison group to migrant children in assessing their social capital and
psychosocial adjustment, for instance, the non-migrant children living in the city.
Conceivably, a comparison between migrant children and their native urban counterparts
will yield more meaningful insights into the disparities as well as pathways to disparities
in children’s psychosocial adjustment as the function of social factors. Last, measures of
the child’s personal agency are self-designed questions developed specifically for the
study. The validity and reliability of the measurement instrument will be enhanced by
future empirical studies.

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Implications for Theory, Practice, Policy and Future Research
Just as the long-term consequences of migration in the United States have been more
closely linked with the second generation and its chances for successful adaptation
(Portes & Hao, 2004), the future of China’s urban society is also dependent on the
development of migrant children. Undoubtedly, migrant children merit urgent attention
from systematic research given their rapid growth, great vulnerability, and lack of
investigation. This study represents a pioneering effort to fulfill this need. Despite the
limitations noted above, this dissertation research has profound implications for the
advancement of social capital theory, for the design and delivery of social service
programs, for the formulation of social policies, and for the direction of future research.

Implications for Theory
This dissertation research advances the theory of social capital by incorporating
multiple dimensions of social capital into one conceptual framework, thus being able to
unravel the mechanism by which family, school, peer, and community social capital
influence the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children through complex mediating
and moderating pathways. Weaving the ecological perspective into social capital theory
increases its comprehensiveness and power in understanding the development of children
and adolescents as a function of social factors. The study also advances social capital
theory by taking into account children’s personal agency in generating and mobilizing
social capital as a potential modifier of social capital effects, which fills a knowledge gap
in the social capital literature. Furthermore, the study contributes to our understanding of
how social capital operates in a non-western context. Knowing the functioning of social

150
capital among migrant children in China would inform the research on Chinese
immigrant children in the United States, considering the underlying shared culture
between these two groups. It holds the potential of fortifying the cross-cultural validity
and applicability of social capital theory.

Implications for Practice and Policy
Findings of this dissertation research indicate the great potential of social capital
building in expanding our current strategies in social service programs and social policy
for the healthier adjustment of migrant children. The study results suggest utilizing social
capital building as an innovative approach that provides a potential alternative and/or
supplement to the asset-based model for the well-being of vulnerable children. In the
literature of social development, asset building has been a well-acknowledged and
widely-applied model in promoting the well-being of children and adolescents in poverty
and other adverse conditions (Sherraden, 2005). Both the asset-based model and the
social capital building model proposed by the present study emphasize the importance of
investment. However, although the asset building approach involves “hard” investments
in monetary or material resources in the form of saving accounts that yield positive
effects in economic, personal, familial, communal, and political terms for people in
poverty including children, the social capital building model emphasizes a “soft”
investment in social relationships that generate and mobilize resources for the benefits of
people in adverse circumstances. The promise of the social capital building model lies in
the fact that, even in situations when little or no wealth is available for an individual to
accumulate assets, there remains a feasible means by which people could generate

151
potential resources to promote the development of children and adolescents, simply
through forging stronger ties in their social contexts. This feature of social capital
building renders it particularly appealing for serving migrant children in mainland China,
an extremely vulnerable population of the society who has limited access to social
resources and is desperate in finding a ladder to upward mobility to help them get by and
get ahead of their disadvantaged conditions. The social capital building model can be
implemented at both the mezzo level through the design and delivery of social service
programs and at the macro level through the formulation and implementation of social
policies.
The significant effects and complex interplay of multiple dimensions of social capital
in predicting the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant children suggest four major
strategies in social work practice to promote the psychosocial well-being of this
vulnerable population. First, given the significant effect of social capital embedded in
each of children’s immediate social contexts on their adjustment, social service
professionals should devote a great deal of their efforts to facilitate the development of
social capital in each domain. Specifically, in the family context, family service programs
could be designed to either educate parents to devote more time and attention to their
children, or cultivate their skills to improve the quality of time they spend with children.
In the school context, given the centrality of school social capital on directly impacting
and also conferring community resources onto children, efforts are expected to be made
to encourage positive interactions between students and teachers and to foster teachers’
increased care for students. In the peer context, it is important for social service
professionals to enhance the social self-efficacy and social skills of migrant children and

152
facilitate their peer relationship building. It is also important to foster a receptive attitude
in the native urban children so as to ease the efforts of peer relationship building for
migrant children. Lastly, in the neighborhood context, community service programs
could be designed to organize regular events and create opportunities for residents to
meet and interact, encourage the exchange of information and opinions, foster the culture
of mutual support, all of which provide an impetus for the development of social capital.
Second, the interactions among various dimensions of social capital in affecting the
psychosocial adjustment of migrant children suggest combined investment in multiple
social contexts, given that increased social capital in one domain might enhance the effect
of social capital in another context. A favorable social environment that facilitates
positive youth development requires adequate social resources embedded in both
proximal and external contexts in the child’s ecological system. It is in great need of
coalition and partnership among service professionals focusing on particular social
domains to combine their efforts in order to improve youth outcomes through integrated
social capital building.
Third, the interactions across social contexts also suggest service programs being
tailored to subgroups of migrant children with access to differential levels of social
capital in the community and school, in order to reach the highest possible effectiveness.
Specifically, to migrant children with lower levels of community social capital, school
plays the most important role in determining their psychosocial adjustment. Therefore,
promoting favorable school climates and student-teacher relationships should be the
focus of prevention programs. However, when social capital embedded in the community
and school are both limited and not likely to improve, providing assistance for the

153
construction of peer social capital would be most effective for improved psychosocial
adjustment of migrant children. In contrast, for migrant children with higher levels of
community social capital, family appears to be most protective of their psychosocial
adjustment, suggesting that strengthening social capital in the family domain would
generate the highest benefits for these children and should be the focus of service
programs.
Fourth, the significant role that children’s personal agency plays in magnifying the
effects of social capital on their psychosocial well-being suggests employing
empowerment strategies to encourage and enable migrant children to make investment in
their various social relationships, thus developing and mobilizing social resources that
will work for their benefit. Cultivating children’ skills in relationship building and
fostering their stronger efficacy beliefs should be the focus of youth service programs. In
addition, social service professionals may also need to educate neighborhood residents on
the importance and skills of respecting and responding to children’s efforts in making
investment for the neighborhood’s good, so as to create a supportive environment that
facilitate the effective functioning of social capital.
At the macro level, findings of this dissertation research suggest increased
investment of government in community building. According to the research findings,
social capital within the community not only bolsters the growth of social capital in other
social contexts thus leading to better adjustment of migrant children, but enhances the
effective functioning of other dimensions of social capital. It proves to be an effective
and efficient strategy for policymakers to allocate greater resources to improve
neighborhood environment as a means to facilitate the development of social capital. For

154
example, maintaining safety of the neighborhood, expanding public spaces, and building
accessible sports and amenity facilities will provide the venue and impetus for resident
adults and children to meet and interact with each other, to build trust and shared values
with each other, and to create a sense of belonging to the neighborhood. These are all
essential for increasing the stock and flow of community social capital. In addition, it is
also important to foster a culture and system at the structural level that recognizes and
rewards individual efforts devoted for public good, which will not only empower
individuals, but build a collective agency and enlarge the potential of community in
improving individual well-being. In a word, building social capital at the structural level
is vital for social development in both personal and collective terms. Promoting the well-
being of the vulnerable population through strengthening community capacity is
essentially producing benefits for the society as a whole.

Implications for Future Research
This dissertation research also points to several promising directions for future
research. First, social capital is not a static resource but continuously evolving as
relationships develop. Migrant children in particular may experience substantial change
in multiple dimensions of social capital as a consequence of their migration from rural to
urban areas. Further research should consider using a longitudinal design to track the
changes of social capital and model the effect of the changes on the psychosocial
adjustment of migrant children. It will be especially beneficial if pre- and post-migration
measures of social capital can be both examined. Statistically, the longitudinal design will
also help establish the causal relationships between social capital and psychosocial

155
adjustment. Second, a comparison of the social capital effects between migrant children
and adolescents living in the urban cities and other groups in the context of migration
may yield fuller understanding of their adaptation. Future research may consider using a
comparative design to examine the adjustment and well-being of the urban-dwelling
migrant children and adolescents as compared to those who are left behind in the rural
areas by their migrant parents, and those who return to the rural areas after living in the
urban areas for a certain period of time. The latter two populations are susceptible to
extreme vulnerability no less than that of their counterparts in the cities, but are paid even
less attention by research and policy to date. A comparison between migrant children and
adolescents and their native urban counterparts will also produce important knowledge of
the disparity in adjustment and the distinctive functioning of social capital within these
two populations. Third, the theoretical framework of social capital developed in the
present study should be applied to other populations, developmental outcomes, and socio-
cultural contexts, so as to fortify its universal validity and applicability. A further step in
this line of inquiry would be developing cross-cultural studies that explore how culture
shapes the mechanism by which multiple dimensions of social capital function on various
development outcomes of children and adolescents in various adverse conditions, as well
as how children’s personal agency in generating, mobilizing, and negotiating social
capital in different cultural settings might interact with their social contexts in unique
ways. Fourth, to close the gap between “what we know” and “what we do”, translational
research is needed to transform knowledge into best practice models. Developing
intervention and prevention programs based on the social capital building model
proposed by the present study and evaluating the effectiveness of these programs should

156
constitute another focus of future research. It is especially important to develop culturally
competent strategies that tailor the social capital building model to specific populations
inhabiting in specific socio-cultural contexts.

In conclusion, social capital proves to be a very promising construct in both
conceptual and practical terms. It has demonstrated great potential of success in
promoting the adjustment and wellbeing of migrant children as an innovative approach in
social work practice and social policy. As our profession seeks best practice models for
promoting healthier development of children and youth, especially those from vulnerable
families and communities, social capital building should be considered a manageable
strategy with potentially high effectiveness and efficiency. Building social capital and
empowering children would set a new stage for social services and social policy to foster
resiliency in children in order to achieve favorable developmental outcomes.

157
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168
Appendices
Appendix I: List of Constructs and Variables
Construct Measure Variable Cronbach’s
α
Experience of things that parents are supposed to
do for children (8 items)
.749
Experience of things that children are supposed to
do for parents (9 items)
.740
Experience of things that parents and children are
supposed to do together (8 items)
.756
Parent-Child
Relationship
Inventory
Experience of feelings that parents and children
should have for each other and the way they
behave with each other (15 items)
.927
Parental monitoring of children’s school activities
and home discipline (8 items)
.620

Family
Social
Capital
(FSC)
Parental
Monitoring
Parents’ knowledge of children’s whereabouts (4
items)
.800
Inventory of
School
Climate
Multiple dimensions of school climate including
consistency and clarity of rules, teacher support,
student commitment and achievement orientation,
safety, etc. (10 items)

.698

School
Social
Capital
(SSC) Student-
Teacher
Relationships
Students’ experience of relationships with teachers
(7 items)

.857
Companionship (4 items) .779
Conflict (4 items) .747
Help/aid (5 items) .753
Security (5 items) .655
Peer
Social
Capital
(PSC)
Friendship
Qualities
Scale
Closeness (5 items) .790
Bonds and trust among adult residents in the
neighborhood (5 items)
.631 Social
Cohesion &
Trust Bonds and trust among children in the
neighborhood (7 items)
.635
Informal
Social
Control
Ability and willingness of neighborhood adults to
provide monitoring and social control for children
in the neighborhood (5 items)

.769
Feeling of togetherness with neighbors (single
item)

Community
Social
Capital
(CSC)
Solidarity
Sense of belonging to neighborhood (single item)
Self-Esteem Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (10 items) .671
Depression Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression
Scale for Children (20 items)
.827
Hostility Hostility subscale adapted from the Aggression
Questionnaire (8 items)
.824

Psychosocial
Adjustment
Life
Satisfaction
Satisfaction with Life Scale (5 items) .832

169
Appendix II: Measurement of Children’s Personal Agency
Construct Measure Variables Cronbach’s
α
Agency in
FSC
Invite parents for activities together; talk to parents
about things on your mind; introduce your friends to
parents; inform parents of your whereabouts; seek
advices from parents (5 items)

.781
Agency in
SSC
Help teachers; talk to teachers about things on your
mind; seek help from teachers; listen to teachers;
try to accomplish teachers’ assignment well (5
items)

.787
Agency in
PSC
Invite friends to your home; help friends; comfort
friends when he/she is down; talk to friends about
things on your mind; congrats or encourage friends
when he/she achieves (5 items)

.803

Child’s
Personal
Agency
Agency in
CSC
Help neighbors; seek help from neighbors; take part
in community events; volunteer in your
neighborhood; encourage parents to take part in
community events or volunteer (5 items)

.776

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation research applies the social capital theory to investigate how social capital embedded in the family, school, peer, and community influence the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant children independently, jointly, and interactively. Adopting a mixed-methods design, and drawing on a sample of 772 pairs of migrant children and their parents living in Shanghai, China, this study addresses three major research questions: 1) How do family, school, peer and community social capital influence the psychosocial adjustment of migrant children in mainland China as they exist simultaneously? 2) What are the mechanisms by which various dimensions of social capital interact with each other to influence children’s psychosocial adjustment? And 3) How does children’s personal agency in generating and mobilizing each dimension of social capital moderate the effect of that type of social capital on their psychosocial adjustment?

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Asset Metadata

Creator Wu, Qiaobing (author)

Core Title Effects of social capital on the psychosocial adjustment of Chinese migrant children

School School of Social Work

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Social Work

Publication Date 07/24/2009

Defense Date 05/13/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Mainland China,migrant children,OAI-PMH Harvest,psychosocial adjustment,social capital

Place Name China (countries), Shanghai (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Palinkas, Lawrence A. (committee chair), Ferguson, Kristin M. (committee member), Johnson, C. Anderson (committee member), Palmer, Paula H. (committee member)

Creator Email qiaobing.wu@gmail.com,qiaobing_wu@hotmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2387

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