Understanding Adolescents’ Filial Piety in Malaysia: A Qualitative Study
Authors: Cong CHIN Wen , Tan Chee Seng 
Published: July 2022

Filial piety is the Confucian virtue of honoring the elders in the family. Although filial piety has been well investigated in countries with Chinese populations, how filial piety is practiced in Malaysia (a multi-ethnic country) remains unclear. Therefore, the present study aims to explore how adolescents in Malaysia practice filial piety in their families. As a part of a larger project on family functioning, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted online with 13 adolescents (15 to 18 years old) from different ethnicities (i.e., Malay, Chinese, and Indian) and regions of Malaysia. As adolescents may not really understand the concept of filial piety, adolescents were asked to describe the characteristics of their ideal families. Then, the interview data concerning the construct of filial piety was extracted for thematic analysis. Our findings suggest that filial piety is practiced across different ethnicities in Malaysia. Besides that, five main elements of filial piety were revealed among Malaysian adolescents: (1) Showing respect to parents (e.g., have good attitude towards parents); (2) Talking to parents (e.g., take the initiative to talk to parents); (3) Showing care to parents (e.g., take care of parents when they are sick); (4) Helping parents (e.g., help to reduce parents’ burden); and (5) Listening to parents (e.g., follow parents’ advice). Our findings are in line with the Dual Filial Piety Model (DFPM; Yeh &amp; Bedford, 2003) that composed of reciprocal filial piety (e.g., “Their attitude must be good to the parents, what their parents dream of them, they must try to achieve it and make them happy”) and authoritarian filial piety (e.g., “Children must give what their parents want like example, their studies, do the best in their studies”). This provides further evidence of the applicability of the DFPM to Malaysian adolescents. Moreover, our findings partially support the Three-Dimensional Filial Piety Model (TDFPM; Shi &amp; Wang, 2019), in which the family role norms (e.g., “I always talk to my parents”) and good affection (e.g., “we express our gratitude by … getting good marks in the exam”) dimensions are evident, while the balance of interests (BoI) dimension is not. One possibility is that adolescents have lesser roles and responsibilities compared to adults and hence, they yet to perceive the need to balance various roles and responsibilities as a means of filial piety. Thus, future studies on adolescents’ filial piety are recommended to use the DFPM, while the TDFPM should be used with caution (especially the BoI dimension). Overall, our findings contribute to a better understanding of the different ways in which adolescents practice filial piety in the Malaysian context (e.g., showing respect to parents, talking to parents, and showing care to parents). Generally, these ways are different from how adults practice filial piety (e.g., visiting parents and supporting parents’ livelihood) due to different roles between adolescents and adults. Hence, our findings not only highlight the need to have a filial piety scale that is adolescent-specific but also provide the characteristics regarding adolescents’ filial piety that could help in the design of such a scale.