| dc.description.abstract | A considerable amount of research has argued that transnational migrant children encounter multiple challenges in adapting to their new environment, while fewer studies have examined children's own perspectives and their role in the transnational migration experience. This master thesis aims to explore the Chinese children’s experiences of transnational migration from China to Norway. Specifically, the study seeks to explore children’s experience of moving from China to Norway and their post-migration everyday lives in Norway. Moreover, this study gains insights into the idea of a ‘good’ child/childhood in Chinese and Norwegian contexts.
This is an in-depth study with five families, including five children and nine parents. This study used qualitative research methods, including semi-structured interviews and several task-based research activities, such as drawing, photographic voices, sentence completion, and neighborhood walks, in an attempt to gather information. The gathered materials were coded by using NVivo™ and analyzed by thematic analysis. Theoretical perspectives from the field of childhood studies have been used to frame this thesis, including an actor-oriented and a constructionist perspective.
In the first analysis chapter of this study, I focus on migrant children's experiences of migration and their daily life in Norway. The research findings indicate that children are not only care receivers in transnational family migration, but they are also caregivers, interpreters and language teachers for their parents. Secondly, migrant children play an important role in influencing their parents' new social network in Norway. Finally, the study also found that the reasons for the participants' feelings of exclusion were mainly from challenges as language, food and cultural identity. Finally, the study revealed the discursive agency of the participants, who adopted tactics to cope with the challenges during the adaptation process.
In the second analysis chapter of this study, I focus on contextualized understanding childhoods and reveal the tensions between discourses on Norwegian childhood and Chinese childhood through children and their parents' accounts and interpretations. I found the participants' parents sought to resolve such tensions by accepting the Norwegian childhood, reducing parental authority, and enrolling their children in extracurricular classes. The study also revealed children's discursive agency by positioning themselves and their parents in a Norwegian context, countering their parents' demands that they attend too many online tutoring classes on the grounds that 'good' parents in a Norwegian context should keep their children actively engaged in outdoor activities.
This study was conducted in hope of supplementing the growing body research in the field of childhood studies and transnational migration studies. Meanwhile, it hopes to shed more light on the experiences and everyday lives of children who have transnational migrated from China to Norway from their own knowledge. | |
