Thought Leadership

Researching and understanding all aspects of people’s lives in Hong Kong across the breadth of the Faculty of Social Sciences’ expertise will provide a meaningful basis for finding ways to improve people’s lives and health, explain the co-leaders of this strategic research theme.

In a broad sense, social science aims to understand societies with a view to improving the lives of the people who live in them. Achieving meaningful understanding is far from a linear task. Societies are complex, multi-layered and full of important nuances that need to be unpacked. For example, Hong Kong enjoys one of the longest life expectancies in the world, it also has one of the fastest ageing populations globally and one of the lowest birth rates. And while long life expectancy is generally considered a positive social indicator, a long life does not equate to a good quality of life. Factors such as sleep, exercise, environment, stress levels and many more all play a role in wellbeing and can vary greatly from one person to the next. Human behaviour, including social relationships and the shape of the technological society we live in, also affects quality of life. With so many overlapping areas, where to start, then, with understanding and improving the lives of people in Hong Kong?

Pushing the Boundaries

Setting the scope of the theme was the first task faced by Professor Vivian W.Q. Lou of the Department of Social Work and Social Administration and Professor Xiaoqing Hu of the Department of Psychology, co-leaders of the Strategic Research Theme (SRT) Population, Wellbeing and Human Behaviour, one of four SRTs that the Faculty will explore during this academic year. After considering the breadth of the topic, the professors have chosen to embrace the widest possible scope for their research and open input to as many contributors as possible.

“In terms of definition, these three words – population, wellbeing and human behaviour are very broad,” says Professor Lou. “Why we put them together, first of all, is because this is our Faculty’s research cluster. We have a multidisciplinary team – we have geography, we have psychology, we have social work, we have public policy. We hoped to find an umbrella theme that could actually embrace the expertise of each of the disciplinary studies and also encourage multidisciplinary teamwork.”

SRT meeting

Life course of Wellbeing

Their aim is to cover every part of the life cycle, from pre-natal to death, and to examine the full spectrum of human experience in the city through the lens of the three fields.

“We want to understand the determinants of this wellbeing for a whole population,” explains Professor Lou. “We tried to see how we can actually have a synthesized theme or some underlying theme, and we thought about covering 24-hours of wellbeing: in the night time, it is sleep, in the daytime, it is activity, or interest, or movement, mobility, all of these.”

As well as allowing for comprehensive coverage of the research theme, this holistic approach to organising the work will also fill an important gap in Hong Kong research literature.

“We want to see how we can actually bring a study to Hong Kong from a life course perspective,” says Professor Lou. “Many of our studies either focus on children or adolescents or adulthood, or older adults, but we don’t have a full population study, except for the general household survey led by Professor Eric Fong, but I think in terms of a study that is designed to test some hypotheses, we still don’t have that.”

Inputs from Multiple Perspectives

The breadth of specialisms within the Faculty is a major advantage that allows the SRT to be deeply explored from multiple viewpoints, explains Professor Hu.

“We have the same research question – like how to understand people and improve wellbeing – but we also study it from different levels, from different perspectives,” he says. “So having this SRT will bring us together, taking our different advantages in our theoretical models and in our methodological tools to approach our common research interests. I think this theme can bring together the different, unique strengths of our colleagues, and we can work together to tackle the most challenging questions in human society and human wellbeing.”

The broad and inclusive structure of the SRT will benefit the entire Faculty, believes Professor Lou, and she is already reaping valuable insights from the rich flow of collaboration opportunities.

“Under this cluster concept, I learn a lot myself, so I think this kind of thematic-based, multidisciplinary group has the advantage of bringing people together and to share,” she says. “It creates a culture of exchange and collaboration, which I feel is also very, very encouraging, for all levels of Faculty members, not only for the young, but also for the middle years, and also for professors.”

“This also provides, I would say, a good model within our Faculty, but maybe across faculties and in the university, we can achieve something with broader impact for society,” adds Professor Hu.

Conference: Longitudinal and Trend Research on Health and Ageing in Asia

Contributing writer: Liana Cafolla