Resilience of College Students with Left-behind Experiences in the Rural China: A Qualitative Study

Background and Purpose: The left-behind children in the rural China is a special group who are raised by non-parental caregivers or even by themselves in rural communities due to the fact that their parents went to urban area making a living with them left behind in villages. Although parent-child separation and community pressure cast numerous challenges to the left-behind children, some of them still achieve positive development. However, there is a lack of study deeply exploring the potential protective factors perceived by left-behind children, and dynamically illustrating the long-term coping experiences exhibited in their development, while some studies have discussed the relationships between the resilience of left-behind children and relevant variables using quantitative, cross-sectional study.

Therefore, this study takes the college students with left-behind experiences who have grew up with high level of resilience as the participants. With the deep understanding of their life histories during left-behind period, we not only investigate the protective factors, but also explore the developmental mechanism of their resilience.

Methods: Employing a purposive sampling, seven female and five male Chinese left-behind college students who have different left-behind durations, left-behind ages, and left-behind ways were recruited as the participants, with an average age of 21 years old. The participants’ life histories during the left-behind period, including life events, coping experience, and influences of important others, were collected by conducting in-depth, semi-structured interviews. After transcribing these interviews verbatim, participants’ life trajectories were depicted in diagrams. Then, the fractional interviews were rewritten into complete “life stories” to reproduce participants’ life experiences from their perspective. Last, these “life stories” were coded thematically using ATLAS.ti 8 software with the framework of the Life Course theory and the principles of grounded theory.

Findings: Data analysis showed that participants’ personalities and current life status resulted from multiple changes in their life trajectories. In face of crises, they developed a series of response strategies (e.g. negating the external things, escaping the reality, and shifting the objectives) at cognitive and behavioral level to adjust themselves positively. Both internal protective factors (e.g. positive personal characteristics) and external protective factors (e.g., non-parental adults’ care, the safe environment in school and community, and appropriate life chance) were drew from their left-behind life histories. For these participants, being left-behind by their parents was only a “macro-background” that took little effect on their long-term psychological health and emotional experience; on the contrary, the “micro-background” they confronted straight, such as the daily interaction with others and the natures of the communities, shaped how they understand and cope their adverse experience during left-behind period.

Conclusion and Implications: By investigating the life-course histories of these college students with left-behind experiences, this study finds that left-behind experience can exert positive influence on them once the existing protective factors are explored effectively. Social workers and relevant managers may take advantage of these protective factors and the mechanism to help the current left-behind children achieve positive development.