Opportunities of Rurality and Challenges of Urbanicity among Vietnamese Adolescents: A Comparative Study of Privilege, Parental Support and Purpose

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Youth Development and Resilience in Rural and Urban Contexts: Insights from North America, Rwanda, and Vietnam

Proposal

Culture influences how individuals form their sense of self, which, according to Markus and Kitayama (1991), lies on the spectrum of independence and interdependence. A domain of self, sense of purpose, is defined by Western literature as setting long-term goals that are personally fulfilling and socially meaningful (Damon et al., 2003). This definition of purpose embraces an independent definition of self where individual values are considered to be separate from others. Previous empirical findings from Western samples assert the linkage between purpose and positive developmental outcomes. That being said, whether sense of purpose, as a developmental asset, functions similarly in a more interdependent setting requires more investigation. In this study, we used the cultural boundary of rurality vs. urbanicity to represent interdependence and independence and to dissect the perception of high school students in Vietnam on finding purpose in their schoolwork, future goals, and the role of parents in this meaning-making process.

The vast educational, cultural, and economic gap between rural and urban settings in Vietnam influences how students develop their assets. The high school drop-out rates are much higher in rural (20%) than in urban areas (6.9%) (Le & Nguyen, 2016). These social and cultural differences indeed, permeate the psychological processes of adolescents. Specifically, using longitudinal data in Vietnam, Hossain and Jukes (2023) found the largest gender differences in self-efficacy were among adolescents from the lowest socioeconomic status, the majority of whom reside in geographically remote provinces. Therefore, this attempt to conduct research in a rural area of Vietnam serves to address the nuances in adolescent purpose development by considering the rural and urban contexts within Vietnam.

Among various cultural factors, relationships with parents are critical in adolescents’ developing sense of self. The message and support that parents provide to adolescents shape adolescents’ motivation, expectations, goals, and purpose (Hill & Wang, 2015). This paper explored and compared parental support in relation to adolescents’ academic expectations, future planning, and purpose across the urban and rural groups of students.

Qualitative data comes from four focus groups with 22 urban students (60% females) and seven focus groups with 22 rural students (80% females). Urban students attend a single high-achieving high school in a city in southern Vietnam. These students come from families in middle to middle-high economic backgrounds where all parents have obtained bachelor’s degrees. Rural students come from seven high schools in a geographically remote region in central Vietnam. The rural students vary in socioeconomic status, with 30% of the fathers obtaining bachelor’s degrees. The urban focus groups were completed in August 2023 while the rural focus groups were conducted in July-August 2024.

We first approached the data from the urban group collected in 2023 using inductive thematic analyses to explore themes and categories emerging from the data. The inductive analysis started with open-coding and iteratively adding new codes and updating themes from each transcript to create a codebook. This codebook was then applied to the rural data while allowing new codes and themes to emerge. The researcher then closely examined across urban and rural data to systemize the contextual, phenomenal similarities and differences.

Preliminary comparative analyses reveal the contradictory perception of privilege expressed by urban and rural students. While urban students have more financial, capital privilege, and parental involvement, they perceive such resources provided by their parents as conditional on their academic achievement. This creates immense pressure and anxiety among urban students: “I had this sense of unhappiness throughout my journey from the primary school up to 10th grade. All of that journey was just pain and suffering. And I was told that all of that was to achieve a greater good. But I didn’t feel like I was achieving anything.”

The rural students in our sample who attend high-quality schools in the region, on the other hand, expressed their privilege in academic opportunities afforded by their school environment as they compared themselves with peers in remote villages. “May mắn (lucky)” is commonly used by these rural students as they shared the experiences that helped them find their purpose: “The fact that my friends are willing to study, and my teachers love me, and they support me with all their might, makes me see that I study for a purpose.”

Such awareness of privilege, social inequality, and opportunity barriers also prompted rural students to form a purpose that serves their community: “While others care about salary, a happy family, I want to create value for my community. Currently, I'm doing volunteer work. I'm also in a wildlife protection club.” In this region, elephants are both the mascot and at risk of extinction, inspiring this student to engage in purposeful activities to protect wildlife. On the other hand, the urban students, when inquired about purpose, prioritized immediate personal achievement and material goals while referring to beyond-the-self purpose as “too blurry” or “far away”: “Not having a purpose does not mean that I don’t have a direction. I still have goals in life, like what schools I want to get accepted into, what jobs I want to get, and how much money. Those are goals, you know. For purpose, it’s more like far away.”

These preliminary findings confirmed the individualistic tendency among urban students in defining their purpose, which was shaped by their interactions with parents about the importance of achievement and status. Such achievement-driven mindsets, however, induced anxiety and pressure on these high-achieving, privileged urban students. This aligns with previous findings among U.S. adolescents (Stiles et al., 2020). Contradictory to the stereotypical view of students in lower SES being at higher risk, we found developmental opportunities for the rural students with high motivation, sense of purpose, and prosociality, which act as protective factors against psychological issues. Future analyses aim to further examine the salience of interdependent and independent traits among the two groups of students in terms of autonomy, financial constraints in future aspirations, and purpose formation.

Author

• My Mikayla H. Do, Harvard University Graduate School of Education