INVOLVEMENT, SELF-BOUNDARY, AND ADJUSTMENT

Abstract

This study is concerned with empirically testing the following hypotheses: 1. Doubtful Self-boundary is associated with difficulty in adjustment. 2. When there is ambiguity in parent-child involvement, the child will not haven firm sense of Self-boundary. 3. Where there is low Family Oriontation, high parent-child involvement is related to doubtful Self-boundary. Results from the data suggest a tendency for doubtful Self-boundary to be related to difficult in adjustment. Ambiguous parent-child involvement is not found to be associated with doubtful Self-boundary. The data shows that, ambiguous parent-child involvement has no deleterious effect on the Chinese educated students, whereas, for the English stream sample, parent-child ambiguity is significantly related to a sense of isolation in the child. Results, from this section of the study indicate that one profitable line of research may be to compare the tolerance for ambiguity of different ethnic groups who have accepted to varying degrees Western standards of precision and specificity. Data for both the 'English' and the 'Chinese' samples suggest that parent-child overinvolvement is associated with doubtful Self-boundary. For the Chinese medium sample, it was also found that low parent-child involvement is associated with doubtful self-boundary where high Family Orientation is present. This result was not foreseen and is actually the reverse of what was predicted for the high involvement cases in the presence of low Family Orientation. Research in the West had long established a relation between involvement in the home and adjustment. This was confirmed in the present study, but only for the English educated sample. Generally, results from the Chinese educated sample challenge this traditional exploitation. One reason suggested for this peculiarity was that, the Chinese stream students, having a more traditionalistic outlook, are characterized by a greater differentiation between behaviour at home and social behaviour outside the home. Thus, behaviour at home is not generalized to behaviour outside the home to such a great extent as in a modern society, The great disparity found between the Chinese and the English stream students was not wholly expected. Hence, this study did not assume an intercultural approach. The difficulties of research with intangible variables are compounded with difficulties that result from having to devise comparable measures for two quite disparate groups. That the 'Chinese' sample usually did not perform well on tests of scalability points out clearly that concepts imported from the West should have been modified before being used in local situations. That this problem was not encountered to such a great extent in the 'English’ sample probably shows how much closer the 'English' sample seems to the culture whose language they have learnt than to their counterparts who have been educated in the Chinese language.