 | ||||||||
| Alumni Association Home > Past Issues > 2004 > January-February 2004 | ||||||||
| ||||||||
| Changing Minds 1/14/2004
Until only a few years ago, a female job-seeker in Hong Kong could have picked up the classified ads and found that women need not apply to managerial positions. Or, if she was disabled, almost any position at all. A lot has changed since then. And much of the credit goes to one woman: Fanny Cheung (Ph.D. '75), chair of the psychology department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Cheung's research into the dimensions of personality and her contributions to Hong Kong's women, disabled, and victims of discrimination and rape have brought her worldwide renown. Now she is one of nine recipients of the first-ever University of Minnesota Distinguished Leadership Award for Internationals. Created by the U's Office of International Programs, the award recognizes the outstanding achievements of international alumni and friends of the University. "International pacesetters" is how Gene Allen, executive director for the Office of International Programs, characterizes the recipients, who are rising young professionals
Cheung entered the University's psychology department in 1970, with a bachelor's degree from the University of California-Berkeley. Professor James Butcher was her doctoral adviser at the University of Minnesota. What drew Cheung to the Twin Cities was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), one of the most widely used personality tests in the United States, which the University developed in the 1940s. With its hundreds of yes-no questions, the MMPI helps researchers evaluate individuals' thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and the behavioral traits that comprise personality. The inventory is often used, with other clinical tests, to assess cognitive functioning and to screen for personality disorders. Five years later, Cheung returned to her native Hong Kong with a Ph.D., a research focus, and a question. As she writes
Not surprising, Alice's adventures, which are included in questions in the MMPI, and other cultural references geared toward American and European subjects, don't translate to other cultures. "When I left Minnesota, I thought I might not be using the MMPI after all," Cheung says. But Cheung found that Hong Kong researchers were indeed using the MMPI on their subjects. Psychologists had to "translate the items on the spot when they were administering the test, and did not have local norms for their reference," Cheung says. And the same was true for their counterparts in China. Cheung saw an opportunity. Working with Butcher, she developed a measurement tool as scientifically rigorous as the MMPI but adapted in every way to an Asian cultural context. The work took more than a decade to produce. Butcher and Cheung, who was still one of the few Asian women in academia, introduced their inventory in Beijing. Four
At first, the new personality measure was named the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory. But that tag didn't reflect its broader utility. "Subsequent research with cross-cultural samples, including Koreans, Japanese, Asian Americans, and European Americans, convinced us that what we originally thought to be indigenous personality domains [of Chinese culture] might also be relevant to other cultures," Cheung writes. The tool is now the Cross-cultural Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI). Like its Minnesota predecessor, the CPAI consists of scales that cover universal personality characteristics, such as extroversion and responsibility. But it also identifies traits that are particular to Asian personality descriptions, "such as the preference for harmony, family orientation, or the tendency to present somatic complaints instead of expressing their psychological distress," Cheung says, for example,
Through the CPAI, Cheung also identified a new personality characteristic. "Interpersonal relatedness" describes an individual's need for close relationships, avoidance of conflict, and adherence to norms and tradition, all of them strongly associated with Asian cultures. But Cheung says research shows that what was "useful to the study of the Chinese personality in a range of social behavior, including filial piety, interpersonal trust, conflict resolution, self-esteem, coping, as well as life satisfaction," also applies to Asian American and white American college students. (Consider the universal dynamics surrounding shared bathrooms in dorms and other communal dwellings.) This new dimension, rooted in Asian traditions, could help Western scientists better understand their own society. "What were considered as 'indigenous' constructs in Asia may inform the blind spot in Western trait measures of personality," Cheung says. Cheung grew up in a mansion in Hong Kong,
It might be a leap to say that Cheung's access to schooling later led her to fight for equal opportunities for others, but it probably played a role. First, though, she had to establish her own footing as one of few female professors on campus and, entering academia at age 28, a young one as well. Over the past quarter century, Cheung has helped build the psychology department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from a fledgling unit to one employing 19 faculty members. And in 2000, in what one colleague calls a "palace revolution," Cheung became chair of the department. "Fanny works for unity and out of unity—as much as unity is possible in human affairs," Michael Bond, a psychology professor and colleague of Cheung's in Hong Kong, writes in an
Says Butcher, her University of Minnesota colleague, "She always knows the right thing to do." In the late 1990s, Cheung took on prejudicial behavior in Hong Kong. "Discriminatory and stereotypic attitudes were very common," she says. "It is against this backdrop that the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) was established." It was 1996, and Cheung herself founded the EOC during a three-year leave from teaching. In time, the commission, fighting "resistance, trivialization, and skepticism" all the way, lobbied for and won Hong Kong's first three antidiscrimination laws. But laws could go only so far, so Cheung and her colleagues designed a public education campaign and then surveyed its impact. They produced TV
Soon, teachers began learning to include girls and children with disabilities equally in classroom activities. Corporate executives learned about sexual harassment and equity pay. City councils learned to accommodate untraditional families in their midst. Cheung acknowledges that stereotypes are slow to fade. But the data have shown promise. "When the EOC was first established, 33 percent of newspaper recruitment advertisement specified sex or lack of disabilities and were discriminatory in nature," she says. "Within six months after we educated the advertisers about the requirements of the law, sent them warning letters as well as samples of good practice, and then brought a number of blatant cases to court, there are no longer such advertisements found in the newspapers."
Cheung led a War on Rape campaign in the late 1970s and, in the early 1980s, developed Hong Kong's first community-based women's center, which provides support services to rape survivors. In 2000, she established the Gender Research Center, an academic program at the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies whose reach extends into mainland China. Among other book credits, she co-edited a 1999 collection of essays titled Breaking the Silence: Violence against Women in Asia, which argued that violence and discrimination against women are human rights issues. And she was awarded the honor of Officer of the British Empire in 1997. Cheung has been called a pioneer in gender research and equity in Hong Kong. But, she explains, "The way I see it, the 'pioneer' position came as a result of my willingness to take up initiatives to speak up and do things that need to be done." Diane Richard is a freelance writer in Minneapolis. |
|
