The implicit and explicit sense of belonging in migrant children in China

We investigated whether Chinese children who have migrated from the countryside to the city have a sense of belonging to their hometown or to their current place of residence. We measured both their explicit and implicit sense of belonging using the Sense of Belonging Questionnaire (SBQ; Sun, 2007) and the Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT; Sriram & Greenwald, 2009). We found that there was a discrepancy between these children’s explicit and implicit cognition: they had an explicit sense of belonging to the cities in which they lived and an implicit sense of belonging to their previous homes in the countryside. Our findings may help migrant children adapt to city life by leading them to explore their implicit ability to differentiate virtual life on television from real life.