Online participation, civic engagement and identity of ethnic minority students in Hong Kong

Understanding Hong Kong ethnic minority (EM) students’ perceptions of their online participation (OP), civic engagement (CE) and civic identity (CI) is important for enriching the lives of EM students in Hong Kong. This study explored the relationship between online participation, civic engagement and identity in selected Hong Kong EM schools using validated measures such as perception of OP, OP through online social media platform, civic awareness through OP, CI of “Hong Kong first”, CI of “emotional attachment to Hong Kong”, CE at school” and “CE in the community. In contrast with Hong Kong local school demographics, these schools are predominately EM students. Within the sample population (n=748), we expected that EM students would score higher on the measures of online participation compared with local students based on survey results, which suggests that online participation is strongly related to civic engagement and identity. On the contrary, Hong Kong local students scored higher on the domains of civic engagement and identity. Our results suggest that local students perceived civic engagement and civic identity as their civic strengths, whereas EM students reported civic engagement and identity limited to their cultural group and expressed more confidence in online participation. This has policy implications for designing school citizenship education curriculum to promote civic engagement of EM student in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2019 CiCea.