Abstract
For well more than a decade in the People’s Republic of China, population control has been viewed as fundamental for the realization of the “four modernizations” of agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology. Along these lines, China initiated in 1979 what has been designated as the “one-child” policy; in reality this policy is officially grounded in the slogan “one child is best, at most two, never a third” (China News Analysis 1979, 5–6). Actually, the execution of the policy in the urban areas strictly constrains couples to only one child, while considerably more leniency is permitted in the vast rural areas where more than 70 percent of the population lives (Tien 1989).
Adapted from D.L. Poston, Jr. and T. Falbo, “Scholastic and Personality Characteristics of Only Children and Children With Siblings in China.” International Family Planning Perspectives 16 (1990): 45-48.
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Notes
Unlike cities in the West, the spatial definitions of Chinese cities include the cities and the surrounding suburban counties covering their rural hinterlands. Changchun’s urban component (the city proper) contained a population in 1985 of 1.8 million residing in an area of 1,116 square kilometers; conversely, the suburban counties of Changchun contained a population of about 4 million inhabitants in an area of 17,765 square kilometers (State Statistical Bureau 1985).
We pretested many of the items on the Checklist in Beijing in 1985, and each attribute was presented in a semantic differential format. That is, we asked the teachers to indicate where each child was located along a line connecting the two polar attributes. But they uniformly had a difficult time making gradations of judgments for the attribute of each child. Most simply checked one or the other polar attribute. We discussed these issues with Chinese scholars and learned that Chinese respondents prefer to use checklists rather than rating scales when evaluating personality characteristics. At first we were concerned about this fact, given the tendency in the West to use gradations of judgments. But we later remembered that some common and very important personality instruments used in the West are indeed checklists. For example, the Adjective Checklist (Gough 1952; Gough and Heilbrun 1965) was designed to be used by adults as a self-report instrument to generate scale scores, including one scale that reflects the sum of all the positive adjectives checked. Similarly, the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach 1979a, 1979b, 1981) was designed to be used by parents or clinically trained observers to rate a wide array of children’s personality characteristics. There are hence important parallels in our use of a checklist in China with the use of similar kinds of checklists in the West.
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Poston, D.L., Falbo, T. (1992). Effects of the One-Child Policy on the Children of China. In: Poston, D.L., Yaukey, D. (eds) The Population of Modern China. The Plenum Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1231-2_17
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