A Small Cultures Exploration of UK-Chinese Families with Intercultural Intergenerational Relationships

Abstract

The doctoral research reported in this thesis focused on Chinese families in the UK in which the parents are adult migrants with Chinese backgrounds and the children have spent most, if not all, of their lives based in the UK. This is my own family context as I am a child of Chinese migrant parents, and the research has a reflexive dimension. These families represent an interesting site for intercultural research as the parents were socialised in one context and the children are being socialised in another. Thus, these families are characterised, at least in part, by the intercultural intergenerational relationships at their core. The UK-Chinese community is under-researched and, so too, is the phenomenon of intercultural intergenerational complexities within migrant families. My doctoral study, as focused on five UK-Chinese families, sheds light on both these areas. This study was guided by an exploration of the shaping influences on these families’ cultures. I adopted an ecologically-oriented, small cultures approach (Holliday, 1999) to understand the family cultures. This is a non-essentialist approach which recognises the family cultures as emergent behaviours and practices shaped by their environments. I combined the small cultures approach with Holliday’s Grammar of Culture (2011) to develop a framework for understanding the shaping influences on the families as situated within their social ecologies. The study involved case studies of five families as recruited in 2018. I used multilingual interviews combining English, Cantonese, and Mandarin to generate the data. One parent and one child from each family participated in individual and group interviews between November 2018 and April 2019. The data generated from these interviews were then analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. This allowed me to acknowledge my own experiences in developing an interpretation. Five main shaping influences on the small cultures of the families emerged from my analysis: ‘education’, ‘religion’, ‘identity and cultural values’, ‘language and communication’, and ‘personal trajectories’. Through presentation and discussion of these influences, I provide rich descriptions of everyday family life with a particular focus on the intercultural-intergenerational dynamics within these families. My interpretation leads to a further discussion on how intergenerational interculturality plays out within the small cultures of these families, but also reveals how the parents and children use large culture constructs to make sense of their intercultural experiences. This study provides an important contribution to knowledge by presenting a deeper understanding of how the small cultures of these UK-Chinese families are shaped. This also has value for scholars wanting to understand migrant families more broadly as the relationships between first and second-generation migrants are under-researched.

Date of Award	30 Jan 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Richard Fay (Main Supervisor) & Elena Barabantseva (Co Supervisor)