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CHAIRPERSON

Dr Ko Pei-Chun, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This study sought to understand how boarding at school impacts children’s academic and health outcome in the context of rural China. We situate the study in rural China’s setting to compare the child well-being between boarding students and non-boarding students to shed light on the true consequence of boarding at school. Two data sets have been used in this study. One is national representative data set of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), and the other is a three province middle school survey in rural China. The former is used to inform how current boarding status is associated with child outcomes, and latter examines boarding experiences, such as how life stages and proportion of time of boarding affect child outcomes. For CFPS data, fixed effects regression models and propensity score matching methods were used to correct the potential selection bias. We found that boarding students are more likely to have higher depression scores and to be sick, albeit less likely to be overweight or underweight. They are also more likely to do better academically. We also found that detachment from the home environment has partially contributed to higher levels of depression. With regards to physical health, we showed that the regular exercise, eating and sleeping habits might have contributed to the low incidence of overweight or underweight conditions for boarding students. For the three province rural student survey, we found that proportion of boarding is significantly associated with their academic outcomes.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tong Yuying, born in Mainland China, received her PhD degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and now is Associate Professor in Department of Sociology at Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is also the director for Centre of Chinese Family Studies (CCFS) in Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies and Assistant Dean (Research) in Faculty of Social Science at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her main research interest areas include migration and immigration, gender, family and life course. She has published in the mainstream sociology and population journals such as American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Science Research and Demography. Her current on-going research topics include following aspects: 1) Integration of immigrants/migrants in the host society, in which she has examined migrants or immigrants’ integration in both internal and international migration contexts, 2) Consequences of rural to urban migration to rural sending communities, in which she has examined migration and the gender implication in household livelihood strategy and economic outcome as well as left-behind persons’, including both adults and children’s well-being, and 3) the third area is family and life course transition, in which she has studied family transition in China and other East-Asia area.

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