Yiping Wang

Chinese Students’ Political Attitudes and Participation

This was my Master’s project while I studied at The Education University of Hong Kong under the advisory of Prof. Kerry Kennedy. This project aims to understand the different pattern of political attitudes (political trust) and behaviors (legal protest, electoral participation and informal participation) among secondary students in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Adopting a comparative and quantitative methodology, this study utilized secondary data analysis with large samples. This study found that students from both societies showed a weak endorsement of illegal protest but a strong endorsement of conventional participation. Mainland Chinese students demonstrated a stronger endorsement of conventional participation than their Hong Kong counterparts. Inner-group analysis results suggest that Hong Kong had more Alienated-Radical Participators while Mainland China had more Supportive-Active Participators. In general, Mainland Chinese students were more regime-supporting and Hong Kong students were more regime-challenging.

Media Portrayal of Students’ Political Protest in Algeria

This is a collaborative project with my colleague Fadhila Hadjeris at UCLA. This project aims to understand the role of media in shaping youth’s political participation. This study focuses on the media portrayal of the student protestors and the state in the 2019 Hirak protest in Algeria. This study intends to understand the power structure underlying the national and international media presentation.  Using news values analysis as the research framework, this study compared the images of actors in protest in two media: Echorouk, the national Arabic newspaper and the New York Times, an English newspaper.

Gender Representation in Chinese and Egyptian Science Textbook

This is a collaborative project that I work together with my colleagues in the Smart Learning Institute at Beijing Normal University. This project aims to understand how gender related values are shaped by the school education. We compare the gender representation in science education textbooks between China and Egypt based on social semiotic framework. Both the implicit meaning and the explicit meaning that images convey related to gender representation in science textbooks are analyzed. The findings revealed that gender gap still exists in the images of both Chinese and Egyptian science textbooks. Females were less represented in the textbook images compared to males, and their role was mostly a caring role. Notably, unlike the Chinese females and the common gender stereotype, Egyptian females were represented in a more active and powerful way as the explicit meaning analysis indicates. The findings of this study could help in better designing science textbook images to reduce gender bias.