Effects of Parental Attitudes and Modern Exposure on Chinese Traditional-Modern Attitude Formation

Abstract

Following recent Traditional-Modern attitude change regarding research, additional evidence to support traditional-modern attitude change hypotheses is presented, and is concerned with the relative effects of parental socialization and other modernizing influences on attitude change among groups of Hong Kong Chinese. Younger Hakka village children were found, as expected, to have significantly more traditional attitudes than other children, while their traditional-modern attitudes also correlated more highly with those of their parents. Two matched adolescent Anglo-Chinese and Chinese Secondary samples were also chosen to examine the relative effects of parental socialization and mass media on attitude change. Both parental T-M attitudes and exposure to mass media were relevant to the development of student's T-M attitudes at the Anglo-Chinese school but for the Chinese Middle school only parental T-M attitudes were relevant, not exposure to mass media.