CHEUNG Nicole Wai-ting

Nicole W.T. Cheung’s main research interests lie in the sociology of deviance, the sociology of youth and addiction. First, her research on substance abuse is closely related to the normalisation of adolescent recreational drug use within non-Western cultural contexts. The normalisation paradigm introduces a ground-breaking, risk society perspective on social change – a prominent postmodern paradigm in sociology that has seldom been applied to the drug and deviance fields – to conceptualise youthful drug abuse. Second, Cheung has extended her research focus on substance abuse to gambling disorder. With the goal of bridging the literatures on gambling and the sociology of deviance, she has conducted two large-scale studies of adolescent gambling (with a student sample across 83 high schools) and gender disparities in gambling among married couples (with a community sample of 1,620 couples) in Hong Kong. Both studies yield significant contributions to the very limited body of gambling research in the sociology field. Third, she has also examined migration and adolescent victimisation/health in the context of young rural-to-urban migrants’risk behaviour and mental health in contemporary China. Victimisation as a form of social stress may contribute to the suboptimal mental well-being of rural migrant adolescents in urban China, but such undesirable effects may be buffered by social support ties forged in receiving cities and rural homes. Fourth, Cheung’s scholarship focus on the transition from school to work responds to a wider agenda on youth development in the increasingly precarious transition to adulthood. The research impact of this focus lies in going beyond the conventional structuralist orientation to locate the often overlooked social-psychological mechanisms (work motivation, alignment of occupational-educational aims and plans, career-related parental support and exposure to social stressors) that mediate the structural influence on the decisions made by youth under stress with the labour market outcomes of their plans.