Identifying psychological resilience in Chinese migrant youth through multidisciplinary language pattern decoding

Sijia Li, Shuang Lu, Shiguang Ni and Kaiping Peng

Children and Youth Services Review, 2019, vol. 107, issue C

Abstract: China's four decades of rural-to-urban labor migration has created 36 million migrant youth, who encounter more adversity than their urban peers due to educational and socioeconomic exclusion. This study focuses on the psychological resilience of these migrant youth since it indicates the ability or success to cope with adversity. We examine psychological resilience indicators based on migrant youth language patterns extracted in a multidisciplinary way. Our research questions are: whether Chinese migrant youths' language patterns indicate their resilience-related characteristics, and how effectively can three language analysis approaches (user-defined dictionary, feature extraction, and word co-occurrence) identify these indicators, which may be further applied as machine learning features for psychological resilience level estimation. Students in a middle school for migrant youth in Shenzhen, China were recruited as initial participants, and their resilience levels were rated by the Chinese version of Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale. These youth then wrote one week of diary entries. The high- (n = 37) and low-resilience (n = 45) participants' writings were analyzed through the three language analysis approaches. The results suggest that Chinese migrant youth in this study present distinctive language patterns that closely relate to resilience indicators (positive emotion, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and positive affect), which can be further employed in differentiating resilience level (high vs. low) as machine learning features with satisfactory prediction accuracy. Our findings suggest a new interdisciplinary approach for effective psychological resilience identification among migrant youth in China and other high-risk youth populations.

Keywords: Psychological resilience; Language patterns; Migrant youth; Chinese; Multidiscipline; Language analysis approaches (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190740919306747
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:107:y:2019:i:c:s0190740919306747

DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.104506

Access Statistics for this article

Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey

More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().