Chyi-In Wu

Objective: The current study examined whether Taiwanese intimate partners' gender would determine their latent profiles of gender role attitudes, warmth toward partner, and perceived equity at home and in society. Background: Taiwanese middle‐aged adults have received traditional education rooted in Confucianism and encountered societal shifts in gender roles. How their gender in the context of East Asian cultures affects their gender role profiles is understudied. Method: Using data collected in 2022 from the Taiwan Social Change Survey, a nationally representative data set, we conducted a latent profile analysis of Taiwanese intimate partners ( M _age = 52.5, N = 1,024, 55% female) to explore potential determinants of their group membership of gender role profiles. Results: Three latent groups were identified: The largest group (64%; women represented 59% of this group) had the highest egalitarian gender role attitudes and warmth toward partner. The other two groups were a more traditional gender role profile (21%; mostly men) and an egalitarian gender role profile with the lowest perceived inequity at home and in society (16%; mostly women). Conclusion: Taiwanese gender role attitudes have been more egalitarian over the past decade. Intimate partners' gender predicts their gender role profiles as indicated by variables across bioecological levels such as individual gender role attitudes, warmth toward partner, and perceived equity in family and society. Implications: Although a larger proportion of Taiwanese women showed more egalitarian gender role profiles than men, Taiwanese men represented 41% of the largest group, similar to the proportion of male participants (45%). The fact that most Taiwanese, regardless of gender, are classified in the most egalitarian group is worth investigating. Practitioners promoting gender equity could pay more attention to clients' gender role profiles.

Background: Drinking alcohol of adolescents is an important issue in Taiwan. The purpose of the research is to determine how drinking expectancy and drinking refusal self-efficacy influence drinking behavior among Taiwanese adolescents based on a cognitive model of alcohol consumption. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, a total of 908 students, selected from 10th to 12th grade of six high schools in Taiwan, were stratified randomly. Pearson correlation, and multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the relationships among drinking expectancy, refusal self-efficacy, and alcohol use, including drinking frequency and drunkenness frequency. Results: There was significant positive relationship between drinking expectancies, and drinking and drunkenness frequency; and negative correlation between drinking refusal self-efficacy, and drinking and drunkenness frequency. Multiple regression analysis revealed that (1) tension reduction, sexual enhancement, social pressure, emotional relief, and opportunity to drink significant predicted drinking frequency (Adjusted R² = 0.352, p < 0.001) and (2) tension reduction, increased confidence, cognitive enhancement, and social pressure significant predicted drunkenness frequency (Adjusted R² = 0.226, p < 0.001). Conclusions: Adolescents have positive outcome expectancies regarding increased drinking frequency. Under the pressure of social interaction, drinking was the most difficult to refuse. Alcohol expectancy and drinking refusal self-efficacy have both shown notable influences on Taiwanese adolescents.

In Taiwan, thousands of students from Yuanzhumin (aboriginal) families lag far behind their Han counterparts in academic achievement. When they fall behind, they often have no way to catch up. There is increased interest among both educators and policymakers in helping underperforming students catch up using computer-assisted learning (CAL). The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of an intervention aimed at raising the academic performance of students using an in-home CAL program. According to intention-to-treat estimates, in-home CAL improved the overall math scores of students in the treatment group relative to the control group by 0.08 to 0.20 standard deviations (depending on whether the treatment was for one or two semesters). Furthermore, Average Treatment Effect on the Treated analysis was used for solving the compliance problem in our experiment, showing that in-home CAL raised academic performance by 0.36 standard deviations among compliers. This study thus presents preliminary evidence that an in-home CAL program has the potential to boost the learning outcomes of disadvantaged students.

Previous studies reflect a high prevalence of depressive symptoms among Taiwanese adolescents (ages 13–18), but there is an absence of literature related to the risk of depression of children in Taiwan (ages 6–12), particularly among potentially vulnerable subgroups. To provide insight into the distribution of depressive symptoms among children in rural Taiwan and measure the correlation between academic performance, we conducted a survey of 1655 randomly selected fourth and fifth-grade students at 92 sample schools in four relatively low-income counties or municipalities. Using the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D) we assessed the prevalence of depressive symptoms in this sample, in addition to collecting other data, such as performance on a standardized math test as well as information on a number of individual and household characteristics. We demonstrate that the share of children with clinically significant symptoms is high: 38% of the students were at risk of general depression (depression score ≥ 16) and 8% of the students were at risk of major depression (depression score > 28). The results of the multivariate regression and heterogeneous analysis suggest that poor academic performance is closely associated with a high prevalence of depressive symptoms. Among low-performing students, certain groups were disproportionately affected, including girls and students whose parents have migrated away for work. Results also suggest that, overall, students who had a parent who was an immigrant from another country were at greater risk of depression. These findings highlight the need for greater resource allocation toward mental health services for elementary school students in rural Taiwan, particularly for at-risk groups.

This study examines the growth trajectory of the psychological well-being of Taiwanese adolescents from early to late adolescence. Under the competitive educational system in Taiwan, family and school context are two major loci accounting for the developmental outcome. Data are taken from the Taiwan Youth Project, which is a longitudinal panel study of 2696 students since the year 2000. The study uses individual depressive symptoms as the dependent variable. Family cohesion, family educational strategy as well as classroom effects at school are chosen to indicate the potential contextual influence. Using the latent growth curve method, the analysis confirms that family and school factors do produce different effects over time. Family context is salient at the initial status, but not for subsequent development. Class cohesion as well as adolescents' perceptions of unfairness by teachers determine the depressive level, the linear slope and the non-linear quadratic growth curve. In other words, once the adolescent gets used to junior high school, the school context tends to exert more pronounced effects. Further analysis on gender comparisons indicates that selective family and school effects are more pronounced among females, with a greater degree of depressive symptoms over time. The article concludes that while family and school have different impacts on the growth curve of individual depressive symptoms, the school context exerts salient effects over an adolescent's life course.