Migration status, emotional engagement, and social exclusion in Chinese schools

Since migration has become one of the pressing issues of our time, the school engagement of migrant children in the destination cities has drawn increasing scholarly attention. While most existing studies have focused on the cognitive and behavioral dimensions of school engagement of migrant children compared to local children, the emotional dimension has received less scholarly attention. Using a large-scale, national representative, school-level longitudinal survey data conducted in 2014 in China, this study examined the effect of migration status on children's emotional engagement in school.

This study was conducted with 15,872 Chinese junior high school students (mean age = 13.52, SD = 1.24) using ordered logistic regression. KHB mediation analysis was employed to explain migration-emotional engagement linkage.

Compared with urban local children, both rural and urban migrant children are less likely to feel closely connected to their peers in school and are more likely to feel bored and to express escapism. The KHB mediation analysis further suggests that compared with the number of friends and proportions of the same-school friends, the percentages of local friends at the same school mediate most of the effect of migration status on all three measures of emotional engagement, particularly for rural migrant children.

These findings revealed that although both social exclusion and the absence of friendship play statistically significant mediation roles, social exclusion is of vital importance in understanding the differences between migrant and local children in emotional engagement.