Motives of Students from Mainland China Studying Abroad at Kinmen: An Exploratory Perspective

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the attraction and motives to mainland students, if they would like to study in Kinmen. This research developed both qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the insights of mainland students' motives, then developed motives to study in Kinmen questionnaire that were measured students of Mainland China. The scale was developed based on studying abroad theory from education and sociology and from interviewing officials, experts and students of mainland. The scale was then administered to 397 senior high students from Xiamen (Amoy), Zhangzhou, and Quanzhou in Fukien province, China. The results showed that there were 7 factors extracted through factor analysis during the establishment of construct validity: tertiary education quality and reputation, tertiary education resources & environment, personal concern factor, cost factor, cognition of Kinmen factor, quota factor, and regulative limitation factor. For each factor, the Cronbach a exceeded.70, a structural equation model (SEM) showed that the theoretical model fit the observed data well. This newly developed scale has theoretical and practical implications for future research on studying abroad and attraction to students from mainland.