Crisis and vulnerability in adolescent development

It was argued that adolescent development should be studied from a more relational and structural approach (cf. Damon and Hart, 1982). In the first study of 5986 Chinese students, two distinct self-concept dimensions were included and their relations to one another and to locus of control, extraversion, and test anxiety were compared across six primary and secondary grade levels. This was in contrast to past studies' focus on the overall change of single or global aspects of self-concept. It was found that self-concept of academic ability increased with age, whereas self-concept of appearance decreased with age. Both self-concepts were closely related. Locus of control was more related to self-concept appearance, and test anxiety to self-concept of academic ability. Extraversion was related only to self-concept of appearance. These relations existed mainly in adolescents (especially girls) and not in younger children. Midadolescence was found to be a critical period as both self-concepts showed quite drastic changes. Tentative evidence showed that the transition from sixth to seventh grade tended to have a dampening effect on the two self-concepts. Results from a second study of 701 secondary school students that included more self-concept dimensions lent further support to the findings of the first study. Crisis and vulnerability in adolescent development are discussed in the qualitative analysis of the relational changes.Ph.D. in social psychology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. Research interests: Value and self-concept development, parental infuences, and deviant behaviors.     

The attentive spectators: Political participation of the Hong Kong Chinese

Based on a large-scale territory-wide questionnaire survey, this study purports to delineate the pattern of political participation of the Hong Kong Chinese. It is found that though the overall level of participation remains low, political activism has nonetheless increased since the early 1980s. Political participation in Hong Kong is primarily parochial and conventional in nature, yet there also exists a significant expressive and unconventional component. The mode of participation is fragmented and largely individualistic. Hong Kong Chinese are increasingly inclined to take collective actions, but participation mobilized by political groups is still limited. Hong Kong Chinese however pay much attention to politics. In view of the coexistence of high cognitive participation and low behavioral participation, Hong Kong Chinese can be appropriately described as “attentive spectators.” He is the author ofSociety and Politics in Hong Kong (1982) andHong Kong Politics in the Transitional Period (in Chinese, 1993)     

Construct accessibility and electoral choice

Chronic accessibility refers to a long-term bias to notice, process, and have available for recall certain types of information across a variety of different stimulus objects in a variety of different situations. This paper illustrates the usefulness of studying the chronic accessibility of political constructs in the field of political behavior. The chronic accessibility of four generic political constructs are operationalized: candidates, issues, groups, and parties. The accessibility of these four political constructs is shown to be relatively stable over time and to guide the processing of information about a wide variety of political objects. Next, a voting model is tested that identifieswhich voters will rely chiefly on issue orientations, group orientations, candidate orientations, and/or party orientations in making their vote decision. The voting model is validated across two distinct ways of operationalizing the political chronicities and three different election studies spanning a 28-year period. Finally, although this paper has focused onindividual political behavior, several ways that an information processing approach could shed light on macrolevel political questions are discussed.     

Reinventing Local Governments and the E-Government Initiative

The Internet provides a powerful tool for reinventing local governments. It encourages transformation from the traditional bureaucratic paradigm, which emphasizes standardization, departmentalization, and operational cost-efficiency, to the "e-government" paradigm, which emphasizes coordinated network building, external collaboration, and customer services. Based on a content analysis of city Web sites and a survey of Web development officials, this article shows that many cities are already moving toward this new paradigm. These cities have adopted "onestop shopping" and customer-oriented principles in Web design, and they emphasize external collaboration and networking in the development process rather than technocracy. The article also analyzes the socioeconomic and organizational factors that are related to cities' progressiveness in Web development and highlights future challenges in reinventing government through Internet technology.     

Policy of decentralization and changing governance of higher education in post‐Mao China

Unlike the Mao era when educational development was entirely directed by the central government, there has been a strong trend to diversification and decentralization of education in the post‐Mao period. This article, being set in this context, examines how the policy of decentralization has affected the governance modes of higher education in Mainland China. More specifically, the article focuses on three major aspects of education governance, namely, financing, provision and regulation in education, with special attention given to examining the changing relations between the state, local governments and other agents in education delivery. One very significant consequence of the change is that the public‐good functions of education, of which the state has taken the primary role of a reliable guarantor, have diminished. Nonetheless, the state's role as a regulator and overall service coordinator has been strengthened rather than weakened under the policy of decentralization. These recent developments in China's higher education also reflect the global trend of decentralization in educational governance. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Allele frequencies and genetic data of 16 highly polymorphic loci in Koreans

Allele and genotype frequencies for the 15 STR loci (FGA, vWA, MBP-L, MBP-H, HumTh01, D3S1358, D3S2406, D5S818, D7S820, D8S1179, D13S317, D18S51, D19S253, and D21S11) and two VNTR loci (D1S80 and D17S5) in a sample of unrelated Koreans were determined.     

Fixed Investment and Economic Growth in China

This paper attempts to investigate empirically the investment-growth relationship in China. Using the exogeneity framework pioneered by Engle et al. (1983) and Engle and Hendry (1993), we find that fixed investment is a key determinant of China's economic growth, which, surprisingly, has not been rigorously examined in the literature. The super exogeneity test results suggest that there exists a robust (or structurally invariant) relationship between capital formation and income growth, thereby giving credence to policy evaluation.