Family background and the choice of Hispanic Philology among liberal arts students in China

Abstract

This article focuses on how family backgrounds affect the choice to study Hispanic Philology in China. Specifically, our aim is to study the mediating effects of the motivation of choice, and the conditional indirect effect of parental values. The sample comprised 9,60 students at sixteen Liberal Arts Majors departments in twenty-one universities. To reach our goal, we combined four analytical methods, including: Principal Components analysis, Binary Logistic regression, Mediating Effects, and Moderation Effects. The results revealed that student choice was influenced by family backgrounds. Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation play a partially mediating role, while parental values affect the strength and direction of that relationship as the moderating variable.