Normative expectations of social behavior and concern for members of the collective in chinese society

Some theorists have recently contended that collectivism in Chinese society is target specific. In the present study, I hypothesize that in Chinese society, there are different expectations of social behavior for different relationships. This hypothesis was tested by asking subjects (64 men, 94 women) in Hong Kong to fill out the Chinese Popular Saying Questionnaire (Ho, Chui, Ko, and Mung, 1985), which consists of 35 normative statements (popular sayings) about how an individual should interact with other people. The target-specific Individualism—Collectivism scale (Hui, 1984) was also administered to the subjects. I hypothesized that collectivism in different relationships would be associated with different factors extracted from the Chinese Popular Saying Questionnaire. The results confirm the hypothesis.