This study compares the findings of two qualitative research studies on meanings of divorce endorsed by Chinese divorced women in Hong Kong conducted in 1998–2002 and 2016–2018, respectively. It is clearly shown that ideas about divorce have changed enormously in the past two decades. While the ideas that divorce is not acceptable and divorced women are failures were still prevalent, particularly in the divorce decision-making process, there has been a move towards a more dominant modern stance on divorce, although two powerful obstacles, the welfare of children and social stigmatisation, have persisted.
This article presents an empowerment model for working with Chinese divorced women through the reconstitution of meaning. Informed by feminist poststructuralism, the social worker facilitates the reconstitution of personal meanings of divorce held by Chinese divorced women by revealing the discursive roots of meanings and by interrogating with the women the meanings constituted by historical and social discourses on divorce in Hong Kong. The intervention process involves exploring positive meanings of divorce, challenging cultural oppression, exposing the discursive roots, and choosing alternative identities.
Based on the findings of an evaluation study on the first two phases of a cross-the-border supervision service project performed by a Hong Kong non-governmental organization, this paper sheds light on the nature of social work supervision in Shenzhen and the constraints of cross-the-border supervision.
Consideration of welfare regimes in Hong Kong has generally neglected gender and care work issues, focusing instead on welfare ideologies relating to production and the market orientation of social policies. In addition, traditional Chinese values place a high priority on motherhood. Drawing on qualitative interviews with lone mothers and social workers, this article considers welfare reform in Hong Kong from the late 1990s and the shift to welfare to work, examining these from the perspectives of gender. It suggests that as a result of the reforms there is a danger that lone mothers become double failures, as carers and workers.
AbstractPrecarity is a term capturing the migrants' situation under globalization and migration-driven uncertainties. Many have attempted to explain the precarity in terms of employment changes, but fewer in terms of non-employment ones. A systematic review is conducted to summarize the conceptualization of migrant precarity manifested in non-employment aspects. Studies (n = 46) from 2014 to 2024 were selected by searching through social science databases of using the keyterms of "precarity" or "precarization" or "precariat" or "precariousness" AND "migrants" or "migration". Precarity conceptualizations were compared by migrants' narratives to identify precarity items omitted in literature. Findings showed that migrants' precarities suffer from typical economic, social and legal precarities. Yet, precarities of household, information and housing are understudied. Moreover, analyzation of migrants' narratives shown mismatches to scholar's conceptualization, which reflects a need for scholars to research with the voices of migrants to rectify the conceptualization. The review also shows a socially reproduction relationship between precarities, while multidimensional conceptualizations will help scholars' analysis to stick consistently to migrants' experiences. It is also recommended to research more on information, housing, and psychological precarity, apart from a need to adopt longitudinal lens into migrant precarity studies. Words count for body of manuscript: 8,524 (excluding references and appendix).
In Hong Kong, professional social workers made their presence felt when they delivered a variety of services at the height of the pandemic. Social workers who were working in community development projects or who had adopted community work approaches have become the major service providers when the availability and accessibility of other types of social services have been seriously impeded. This article reports on a qualitative research study conducted to examine (1) how community social workers have planned and implemented services, (2) their use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), and (3) ideas for addressing injustices in disaster management work.
AbstractEchoing the call to incorporate the intersectionality framework into studies of gender structure, this paper applied the framework to re-analyse the quantitative and qualitative findings of an evaluation study on a women empowerment community project in Hong Kong. This effort revealed the importance of the gender structure's dimension of sexual division of labour and the intersectional effects of gender, race and class in explaining the mixed traditional and progressive views in different items within a domain and across different domains of the gender division of labour, specifically the marital, parental, employment, social activities and education domains. The low-income migrant women have upheld different traditional ideas in these domains. However, in contrast with the richer and local women who also shared these traditional views, low-income migrant women in this study questioned some prevailing ideas in these domains, due to their need to survive the conditions defined by the intersection of gender, race and class. The findings of this study, despite being preliminary and limited, demonstrate the significance and feasibility of studying gender structure adopting the perspective of intersectionality. Arguably, this lack of understanding of the intersectional effects diminishes the effectiveness of community intervention. In light of the paucity of research adopting the intersectionality framework in the community development field in general, and a similar deficit in the feminist and community development fields in Hong Kong in particular, the failure to adopt the intersectionality framework by the community project under consideration is understandable. It is likely that as this framework becomes more prominent in the future, given its potential to offer deeper insight into the dynamics of gender structure, community interventions for women of different identities could be strengthened.
AbstractDigital divide as an academic term captures the inequality involved in the access and usage of digital devices as well as real-life consequences of the imbalance. Concerning migrant women who suffer from the digital divide, there have been extensive studies focusing on the affordances and benefits of having digital access. The problematic side of digital divide and factors leading to such divide, however, are understudied. Therefore, a systematic review is conducted to investigate the digital divide items and factors from the existing literature. Studies (n = 19) were selected by searching through six social science databases of using the search words combination of "digital gap" and "digital divide," "migrant," "immigration" and "immigration," and "female" and "women." Findings suggest that concerning the access and utilization (level 1, 2 of digital divide), items such as poor network of the home country and factors such as patriarchal ICT culture hamper the access and usage of digital tools. Concerning the outcome of utilization (level 3 of digital divide), migrant service access and urban integration have been undermined. This review shows that digital divide experiences of migrant women have been understudied, and therefore we recommend that more empirical research, with multiple types of data and longitudinal design, in various immigrant-dense countries, should be conducted by adopting the theoretical lenses of lived experience and intersectionality, so that more voices of these women can be heard. In addition, needs assessment based on our identified digital divide factors should be conducted before the training programs for migrant women so as to more effectively bridge the digital divide.
