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careers or find themselves at high positions, especially at the managerial level. These paradoxes still
represent current issues for Singaporean women today (Liang-Lin, 2015).
Working and pursuing a career has clear benefits for a women. Women can built on their
pension savings and considering the fact that women tend to outlive men, these savings are crucial for
an independent source of income in later life. The fact that women are almost forced to choose
between work and family life directly relates to their possibilities to provide informal care for elderly
family members. When women choose work, they have to go all-in to compete with men and cannot
step out for caring duties without falling behind (Vaswani, 2015). Alternatively, when women choose
a traditional path at home, they can commit themselves to practices of filial piety easier (Fan, 2007).
The Singaporean government investigated how many citizens were able to work, but chose not to and
why. The report on Labour Force in Singapore (Ministry of Manpower, 2015) showed that 84% of the
non-working prime working age group (25-54 years old) were female of whom 14% indicated care-
giving responsibilities as their main reason to stay at home. In total, 80% of the females indicated
family responsibilities in general as their main reason. These statistics confirm that familial
responsibilities prevent many women from working outside the house. When considering a full time
job, it would seem impossible for women to provide adequate support and care for elderly family
members next to their working responsibilities.
Hypothesis 3: Hours of work are negatively associated with higher scores on filial piety
Taking into account the findings from previous research on filial piety, there are several factors
that seem to have an influence. Firstly, socio-economic change has led to modern perceptions and
practices of filial piety, which do not fully comply with traditional practices and the expectations of
elderly family members. Therefore, older people are expected to score higher on filial piety than the
younger generations. Secondly, the government attempts to instill moral ethics and the importance
of family through education. There is a lot of attention for awareness and virtue, which enables higher
educated people to remain loyal to traditional values. Thus higher education levels are expected to
predict a higher degree of filial piety. Thirdly, society complicates the abilities for women to
successfully combine work and family life. Moreover, the economic necessity to work forces them in a
certain direction, driving them away from filial responsibilities. In conclusion, a heavier workload is
expected to result in a lower degree of filial piety. The purpose here is to investigate whether these
expectations prove to be true for the sample of Singaporean women in the present study.
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RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The focus of the present study is on whether the age, education level and employment status
of Singaporean women can predict the degree of filial piety. Deriving from the theory, three
hypotheses regarding these relationships and the direction of association were formulated. A cross-
sectional research design will be used to measure the relationships under investigation for a
population of Singaporean women from 2010-2014.
Research design
The unit of analysis is the female population of Singapore, whereas the unit of observation is
a sample of 1083 Singaporean women. The standards of the World Values Survey for a suitable sample
comply with the needs of the present study. The data will be gathered from the World Values Survey,
wave 2010-2014. For the purpose of the study, a construct of the six dimensions of filial piety – to care,
to respect, to contact, to obey, to please and the importance of tradition – will be created to measure
filial piety as a dependent variable. The independent variables age, education level and employment
status are available in the dataset as well, so each hypothesis can be tested using the same dataset.
The dataset of the World Values Survey will be used for statistical analysis in SPSS. A One-way ANOVA
test will be performed to measure the relationships between filial piety and each of the three
independent variables age, education level and employment status.
Case selection
The case selection for the World Values Survey data is determined on a large scale. Samples of
≥1000 respondents are randomly selected within countries and have to meet the age requirement of
18 years and older. The goal is to get a representative national sample of the population. In 2010 –
2014 a sample of n = 1972 was drawn, of which 1083 respondents were female. At last, it is difficult to
determine whether the sample is large enough and eligible to generalize the results for all women in
Singapore. Luckily, the small population of Singapore makes it more likely that the sample is
representative for the population, compared to other countries that can be investigated with the
World Values Survey. All countries have to meet the same requirement of ≥1000 respondents, which
means 0,019 % of the entire population of Singapore compared to only 0,006% of the population of
the Netherlands, for example. Moreover, a sample of ≥1000 is considered excellent for research.
Limitations of the study
In several studies, the importance of financial support was addressed as an indicator of filial
piety, but the available dataset did not offer any insights into this. Considering its value in other studies