Based upon the thinking of “person in situation”, this research aims to utilize the concept of “empowerment” to investigate the female Vietnamese immigrants’experience of participating in mainstream Taiwanese society. The research tries to answer the following questions. Firstly, does (and at what extend does) their participation in the society bring about the experience of empowerment? Secondly, from a macro perspective, how do those related social forces operate to impact on female Vietnamese immigrants’ marriage decisions and their social participation (mostly in the voluntary sector in this research)? And thirdly, whether it is a more prevalent phenomenon that the active participation in the receiving country serves to dis-empower these immigrants?
In order to answer above research questions, a qualitative methodology is employed to probe into interviewees’ personal subjective experience and the concept of empowerment is divided into two aspects: ability and power. It aims to investigate the empowerment of personal ability caused by participants’ social participation, as well as the oppressive practices they experienced due to their positions in the society: their sex, race and social class in contemporary Taiwan. It is hoped that through the participants’ representations, this research could reveal the reality restricting their personal actions against the multiple oppressions. This research suggests that the mainstream society needs to recognize the possibility of disempowerment while we invariably encourages immigrants to actively participate into the receiving society.
