Wing Hong Chui

• BSW, MPhil, PhD
• Professor (Full) and Head of Department at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

The process model of vocational identity was well applied in various Western countries to study the vocational identity process and statuses of college students. However, such research is limited in Hong Kong. Moreover, the relation between vocational identity development and academic performance was inconclusive in the literature, and it was also...

Objectives Online mindfulness-based program (MBP) for parents and families especially in clinical population is limited. Engagement and significant dropout are major issues in MBP implementation. This pilot study examined the effects of an online mindfulness-based program (MBP) on parents of children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (A...

In this chapter, we explore the work of prison officers serving in the Correctional Services Department (“CSD”) in Hong Kong. To fulfil the CSD’s mission, prison officers focus their work on ensuring safe and humane custody, administering rehabilitation programmes, supporting criminalised people’s reintegration, and crime prevention through communi...

Purpose The paper aims to recommend legal and regulatory reforms to better prevent child abuse in childcare institutions in Hong Kong. Design/methodology/approach A summary of investigation report and news reports are referred to in describing the abuse incidents which occurred in a children’s residential home. Routine Activity Theory (RAT) is use...

This study examined the mediating role of civic skill-acts and direct associations of group identity on intentions to engage in peaceful or radical protest actions (i.e., activism or radicalism intentions respectively). A sample of 526 university students in Hong Kong was surveyed. The findings suggested that political identity complementarily medi...

The objective of this study was to examine the potential effects of volunteering on older people’s mental wellness, satisfaction, and motivation. To this end, 193 volunteers aged 51 years and above completed the self-administered survey questionnaires. The results show that older volunteers had higher scores on mental wellness, satisfaction, and mo...

BACKGROUND Online mindfulness-based programs (MBPs) for parents and families, especially in clinical populations, are limited. Low engagement and substantial dropout are major issues in MBP implementation. OBJECTIVE In this pilot study, we examined the effects of an online MBP on parents of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (A...

Introduction: School bullying is a serious social and public health problem. This article aims to explore the association between experiences of childhood abuse and involvement in school bullying, especially considering the mediating effects of depression. Methods: The sample of this study was 3059 students (1584 males and 1475 females) aged fro...

Background: The relationship between child maltreatment and later delinquency is an enduring concern worldwide. However, the maltreatment-delinquency relationship is relatively underexplored in youth gang populations. Consequently, to date, studies have not examined typologies of maltreatment and their associations with violent delinquency, non-vi...

This study addressed the impact on mental health and wellbeing in relation to views of the self, the world, and the future during the early stage of the global novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak. An online survey battery included the 21-item Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21), Subjective Happiness Scale, Self-Compassion Scale...

Facilitating elders’ volunteerism, which comprises motivation and practice to help people formally, is beneficial to the elders and their volunteering beneficiaries. According to social–cognitive theory, such facilitation supposedly benefits from art training to raise elders’ artistic efficacy. This study examines such a supposition with a two-wave...

Adopting rational choice theory, this study assesses both rational and emotional aspects in understanding pathways into and out of crime through the narrative analysis of a Chinese female offender living in Hong Kong, China. We found that poverty enmeshed this divorced, single mother in a commitment problem with a moral dilemma entwined with ration...

The population of female drug users has been growing in China, and these women have been found to care deeply about their weight. Against this backdrop, this study examines the relationship between Chinese women’s illicit drug use and their intentions to lose weight, keep fit, and maintain a slim body shape. The participants of this study were 29 w...

This study explored the influence of parental socialisation, relative to that from crucial dispositions of the offspring and other socialisation agents, on the offspring’s intentions to engage in radical protest actions in Hong Kong, a city that has been experiencing periodical socio-political upheavals and generational rifts over politics. A sampl...

The present study explored the salient characteristics of families experiencing child poverty in Hong Kong by analysing two representative cross-sectional datasets from the 2011 Population Census and 2016 By-census. Specifically, to identify trends in child poverty rates and the risk factors underlying these trends, the relative importance of perso...

Fighting in school is a specific type of violence that has been understudied in China. A total of 2,918 students were recruited through a stratified sampling method from eleven secondary schools in China. The results showed that around 14% of respondents had been involved in school fighting, and self-control significantly mediated the relationship...

China’s new National Security Law, enacted in Hong Kong on 30 June 2020, has amplified widespread concerns among the city’s population regarding the implications of this law. These concerns have at root anxieties related to Hong Kong’s resinicisation, referring to anxieties over Hong Kong's political and economic dependence on mainland China, inclu...

The cost of crime to the public, as a public concern, requires an estimation pertinent to the context, considering substantial contextual variation. Meanwhile, the estimation needs to address issues about feasibility and validity. To address the issues, the present study exemplifies the estimation with both official accounting and tripartite willin...

This study examines the effect of community service arrangements on secondary school students in Hong Kong under the Other Learning Experiences (OLE) component of the New Senior Secondary (NSS) Curriculum. Previous literature has indicated the importance of arrangements and modes of volunteer services on the positive experiences of individual volun...

In China, alcohol-related impaired driving has been perceived as a crucial contributor to traffic accidents. However, the topic of driving after alcohol consumption is still understudied in the country. To fill this void, the aim of this study was to find out male drivers’ unique experiences of drunk driving in China. A qualitative analysis was ado...

Workplace sexual harassment (WSH) has been recognized in the literature as a serious problem for the past 40 years. Since 2017, the global #MeToo movement has fostered local awareness of WSH and inspired researchers in China to pay increasing attention. Guided by the gender empowerment theory, this study investigated the relationships between women...

Suicidal behavior is a severe problem among drug users. This study examines influential factors related to suicide attempts and analyzes possible mediators of the relationship between perceived social support and suicide attempts amongst Chinese drug users under compulsory institutional drug treatment. Taking perceived social support as the indepen...

Bullying has become one of the most significant problem behaviors that school-aged adolescents face. The current study examines the strain–delinquency relationship by employing General Strain Theory as a guiding framework. “Strain” was operationalized as bullying victimization and family dysfunction, “delinquency” was operationalized as bullying pe...

This paper reports the design, delivery, and evaluation of a mentoring programme which aimed to promote critical thinking and problem-solving skills in Chinese university students. Several new elements in this mentoring programme distinguish it from many previous such programmes within the context of higher education. These new elements include anc...

Methamphetamine (meth) use has become a serious health epidemic in China, and the number of female meth users has risen substantially in the previous decade. However, until recently, patterns of meth addiction among Chinese women were rarely studied. To fill the void, this study implemented a thematic analysis approach to investigate Chinese female...

This study examines the differential impacts of social bonds and organized crime affiliation on theft and violence in a sample of 201 male and female youth street gang members in Hong Kong. Specifically, the study examines gender differences in social bonds and delinquency among active youth street gang members aged between 12 and 24 years. A purpo...

In this study, we highlight the temporality of agency as many choices made by incarcerated women are found to be based not only on their evaluation of the present situation but also on their reflections on the past and anticipation of the future. Guided by feminist methodology, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 52 incarcerated women an...

Bullying is a serious public health concern across the globe. While there are a number of bullying interventions with parental components, limited efforts have been made to synthesize the impacts of parenting programs on bullying prevention. This meta-analysis aimed to review and examine parenting programs on bullying reduction that involving both...

This study explores strategies for dealing with client resistance that are commonly used by a group of selected counsellors who work closely with illicit drug users in the community-based compulsory treatment programs in China. Through semistructured in-depth interviews with 16 counsellors, this study finds that different forms of client resistance...

Cambridge Core - Asian Studies - The Hong Kong Legal System - by Stefan H. C. Lo

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to validate an existing measure of The Volunteer Satisfaction Index – Chinese (VSI-C) using the sample of 1,046 secondary school students. Method: In this study, the factor structure of VSI-C was explored and reexamined with a sample of secondary school students in Hong Kong in order to ensure the scale to be...

Using a Hong Kong–sourced sample of participants, this study set out to validate the Chinese version of the Attitudes Toward Prisoners (ATP-C) Scale and evaluate its psychometric properties. To provide further evidence for the ATP-C Scale’s validity, it was then administered to three groups varying in their volunteering experience in Hong Kong. Exp...

This article assesses how an interactive simulation game, a modified version of Simulated Society (hereinafter ‘SIMSOC-modified’), was used for teaching a theoretical criminology course in a Hong Kong university. Its use was intended to enable students to experience inequalities, in terms of wealth and power. The primary focus was to observe how pa...

China is a major producer and distributor of methamphetamine (meth) worldwide. Within the last two decades, China has seen rapid growth in meth use, especially among young men. However, patterns of Chinese male users' initiation of meth is rarely explored. To address this void in the literature, this study adopts China's mian'zi culture to explore...

In the past decade, there has been an evident surge in political activism in Hong Kong, especially among the youth. This paper seeks to explain this development by adopting an emerging framework, the Activism–Radicalism Intention Scale (ARIS), that distinguishes between activism and radicalism and demonstrates how past and current intentions relate...

This study investigated the relationship between Chinese drug users’ perceived social support and their intentions for choosing abstinence. Both bivariate and multivariate analyses were performed with 3,239 drug users, especially heroin (427) and methamphetamine (890) users. All participants were from multiple Chinese compulsory drug treatment inst...

Drug use in China is both associated with criminal behaviour and regarded as social deviance. Drug addicted offenders can either be assigned criminal punishment or compulsory drug treatment, depending on the severity of the crimes they have committed. Compulsory drug treatment is in many ways similar to imprisonment in China. However, both compulso...

The purpose of the present study is to examine the theoretical efficiency of Hirschi’s reconceptualization of self-control in two groups of Chinese adolescents. The study also incorporates the well-established attitudinal scale from Grasmick et al. to examine whether there are any differences in the explanatory power between the two self-control sc...

Young drug users are found to be increasingly involved in criminal justice issues. This exploratory and descriptive study aims to analyze the criminal behaviors among young Chinese drug users through a mixed methods research design. Quantitative analysis indicates that young drug users with and without a history of criminality show significant diff...

The primary aim of this article is to examine the role of triad affiliation in mediating the relationship between child maltreatment (neglect, punishment, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse) and delinquency among active young gang members in Hong Kong. A sample of 177 gang members aged 12 to 24 was recruited to complete a questionnaire with the assi...

‘Cracked trials’, where defendants enter a late guilty plea after a trial date has been set, are considered a societal problem because public resources set aside for trials are wasted. Various government reports attribute the main cause to tactical defendants playing the system, and reforms have been initiated to encourage early guilty pleas and st...

Empirical evidence shows that volunteering is beneficial for society and explanations for different levels of volunteer satisfaction are many. However, no studies have been conducted to examine various roles volunteers can play in explaining volunteer satisfaction. More specifically, this study explores the relationship between the various roles of...

This study explores the importance of organizational structures and formal affiliations with the Hong Kong triads to delinquency among youth street gang members in Hong Kong. More specifically, this study examines the relative importance of the number of organizational structures and triad affiliation to patterns of delinquency in a sample of activ...

Bullying is a widespread public health problem among school students. Using a large sample of Macanese school adolescents, the present study examines psychosocial conditions and demographic characteristics in discriminating the following four subgroups of students: victims; bullies; bully-victims; and a comparison group of adolescents. Participants...

Probation plays a vital role in the criminal justice system because it is the most common disposition imposed on offenders at the present time. Juveniles who are sentenced to probation typically are first‐time and less serious offenders. Probation also has increasingly been used as an alternative to custody for some persistent juvenile offenders. T...

Criminal justice personnel, such as social workers and correctional officers, have been asked to identify effective programs and interventions to work with offenders within the community and in institutions. Several researchers have attempted to review a large number of empirical studies to examine what types of programs are most likely to be succe...

With a comparative study on adolescents in Hong Kong (N = 1,830) and Macau (N = 2,761), this article examines how differences in the wider economic contexts would affect the development of subjective well-being in adolescents. In particular, despite having similar levels of economic development, Hong Kong resembles a mature economy while Macau is s...

This paper explores the relationship between gender, academic achievement, and family functioning in a Chinese cultural background. Primary and secondary school students (n = 1597) in Hong Kong participated in a survey questionnaire. Two competing hypotheses are derived and empirically tested based on the idea that parents are likely to have higher...

Although scholars have shown continuing interest in studying prisoner behavior, relatively few studies focus on Chinese female prisoners’ behavior in the prisoner–guard relationship. In this study, 65 semi-structured interviews were conducted with both female prisoners and guards to document Chinese culture’s influence on female prisoners’ behavior...

Although the negative impacts of parental incarceration on families are generally well established, less attention has been paid to the dilemma of how caregivers communicate with their children regarding parental incarceration. This study provides an understanding of the factors associated with caregivers’ choice to disclose or conceal the incarcer...

Objectives Caregivers of children with incarcerated parents have received little attention in the literature, though they face unique incarceration-related challenges. General caregiver research has highlighted associations between caregiver distress and children's behavioral problems, even implying that the depressive tendencies of caregivers can...

The myriad of negative effects brought about by the incarceration of a family member have consistently been demonstrated in research. However, previous works have tended to focus on the perspectives of family members separately, rather than exploring the dynamic relationships within the family as an entire unit. Moreover, such research is still lim...

This study examined the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the first part of the Chinese version of the CRIME-PICS II Scale, a self-administrated instrument assessing offending-related attitudes. Data were collected from three samples: male Hong Kong young offenders, female Mainland Chinese prisoners, and Hong Kong college students. Exp...

Volunteering is playing an increasingly bigger role in social services and schools both in Western settings and in the Hong Kong Chinese context. The demand for volunteers in the sector of social services is continually increasing (Sherr 2008). Little is known about the willingness of secondary school students to participate in future volunteering...

It is likely that no criminal behaviour breeds as much condemnation and fear as sex offences. Tragic examples of young victims of sex offenders from around the world have raised societal concerns and prompted calls for increased surveillance and control. It is responsible public policy to address these concerns in ways that will increase public pro...

This study investigates the role of parents’ marital status in adolescents’ mental well-being. Although the separation of parents is generally regarded as a negative condition on adolescents’ growth, we find evidence of strong positive development in certain areas. Faced with an adverse family background, even though teenagers might have lower happ...

This study used a mixed methods approach to examine the perceptions of fairness and satisfaction young offenders have toward their lawyers in the Hong Kong criminal justice system, drawing on procedural justice theory. A sample of 168 young offenders aged between 14 and 21 years old was surveyed. Regression analyses indicated that participants who...

Despite overwhelming evidence that imprisonment has negative consequences for family members, very few studies have explored the mechanisms by which incarceration affects families and children. In particular, the father role is crucial to family members. Together with the fact that there have been few studies on incarcerated fathers and their relat...

Low self-control is theorized to be a key correlate of delinquency. Using a nonadjudicated sample (N = 1057) from Hong Kong and Macau, the influence of self-control on self-reported violent and nonviolent delinquencies was investigated using Grasmick’s self-control scale. The influences of demographics and self-control on delinquency were also exam...

Background Little is known about the level of social bond elements and their effects on delinquency among nonadjudicated (traditional low and at-risk school-aged) and adjudicated Chinese male adolescents. Objective Using a large adolescent sample (N = 1,177) from Hong Kong and Macau, this study aims to distinguish the level of social bond elements...

This study uses survey data from adolescents (N = 1,428) in Hong Kong to test the association of gender with happiness and life satisfaction through relationship style and self-concept. While self-esteem and purpose in life are associated with higher happiness and life satisfaction, having more close friends is related to higher happiness, but not...

The Hong Kong government recently introduced a sex offender registry that gives the public access to records of sexual offence conviction. This step was taken in the context of a penal system that traditionally places a high value on rehabilitation and a culture that traditionally supports rape myths. This study explores public attitudes among the...

This study presents an in-depth investigation of reform through interpreting how a selected group of men who have desisted from heroinuse understand and present their change process. It consisted of ten life narratives including the stories of seven successful desisters and three active offenders living in Hong Kong. The 'opportunity" sample was re...

Despite the undercurrents of rights protection in Hong Kong’s juvenile justice procedure, the ultimate goal remains punishment based on welfare needs. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 40 youth defendants and defence lawyers, this article will examine the ways in which youth defendants and defence lawyers negotiate the welfare and justice imperat...

A theoretical explanation of plea bargaining is the shadow-of-trial model (Mnookin and Kornhauser, 1979), which asserts that decision-making behind plea bargaining are based on the probability of conviction and sentence severity. Using the context of Hong Kong's criminal justice system, this study confirms previous studies that found the shadow-of-...

While prisoner re-entry has garnered increasing interest in Western scholarship, scarce attention has been paid to the situation in Hong Kong, despite it possessing one of the higher imprisonment rates in Asia, and its reliance on custodial sentences to rehabilitate young offenders. Drawing upon the experiences of a sample of formerly-incarcerated...

Relatively little is known about the etiology of bullying perpetration and victimization among Macanese adolescents. This study examines the effect of self-control on these behaviors in 365 participants aged between 10 and 17, from two male-only schools (a boarding and a nonboarding school) in Macau. Their bullying perpetration and victimization ar...

While there have been numerous studies on the religious, namely, Christians', attitudes toward punishment, less attention has been devoted to the religious attitudes toward prisoners. This study aims to examine and compare religious affiliation and spirituality with respect to attitudes toward prisoners. Respondents were comprised of a sample of co...

Chinese culture holds very different beliefs regarding sex offenses, violence against women and punishment against offenders. Little is known however about Chinese attitudes toward sex offenders and sex offending policies. The aim of this study was to validate the Community Attitude toward Sex Offender Scale in the Chinese cultural context. Results...

Criminal attitudes have been found to influence criminal behaviour. Yet this is an understudied area in Hong Kong despite the scholarly interests in youth delinquency. In this study, we tested the relationship between criminal sentiments and social factors and illegal conduct among 942 Chinese youths (aged 14–18) in Hong Kong using the Criminal Sen...

Research on perceptions of the criminal legal system has tended to mainly focus on attitudes toward the police and on minority groups other than Chinese communities. The aim of the present study is to measure perceptions of the integrity, competence, and fairness of the various elements of the criminal justice system among a Chinese migrant populat...

Despite the wealth of theoretical literature on globalization and global citizenship, empirical studies on the topic are lacking, especially in the context of pedagogical needs in relation to global citizenship education. In order to address this gap, a study was conducted in Hong Kong to investigate the attitudes of university students towards var...

Background School bullying research on Macanese adolescents is limited. Macau is a Special Administrative Region of China with over 95 % of the population is of Chinese descent. Yet, Macanese people are under substantial Western influences. Objective Using a two male-only school sample of 365 participants aged between 10 and 17 years, this study e...

A mediation model explaining volunteers’ subjective well-being was tested in this paper. It examined the effect of intrinsic motivation on volunteers’ life satisfaction, using the need satisfaction experienced through volunteering as an intervening variable. A questionnaire was administered to 443 participants, not all of whom had previous experien...

Criminal recidivism of the incarcerated population in Hong Kong has rarely been studied. The purpose of this study is to explore the recidivism rates and to identify significant predictors of reoffending among incarcerated male offenders convicted of a nonviolent offense in Hong Kong. Using a self-reported methodological design, 278 offenders were...

The stigma of being an ex-prisoner can lead to self-stigmatizing beliefs and hinder reintegration. For young ex-prisoners, this is particularly challenging as they need not only to transition from prison to society but from adolescence to adulthood. This study explores the experiences of discrimination and self-stigma of 16 young men recently relea...

The prudent management of older people’s financial assets is fundamental to ensuring choice, dignity, and well-being in older age. Families play an important role in assisting older people to manage assets, though these practices have often remained a hidden part of family care. Australian research has demonstrated extensive family involvement in a...

Volunteers are playing an increasingly bigger role in correctional institutions both in Western settings and in the Hong Kong Chinese context, and yet previous studies have focused only on descriptive accounts of their motivation and satisfaction. Utilizing three samples in Hong Kong, namely prison volunteers (N = 54), non-prison volunteers (N = 14...