Introduction
Dr. Sabrina SU is a Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Applied Social Sciences, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She obtained her PhD degree from the University of Hong Kong in September 2017 and has been doing mixed-method studies about youth development, career support services, organizational behaviors, workplace wellbeing, and capacity building among youth work practitioners. She is concerned about the career and life development of young people in general, and youth at risk in specific, such as youth not in education, employment or training (NEET), youth with prolonged social withdrawal behaviors (hikikomori and semi-hikikomori), educationally disadvantaged youth, youth with special education needs, and young mothers. The potential of her concepts such as collective psychological ownership (CPO), experience-driven recognition (EDR), and more enabling others (MEO) are recognized by international reviewers with regard to promoting individual agency and shared agency for enhancing the sustainable career and life development of diverse groups of people in various contexts.
Expert
Dr. Sabrina SU developed the “Experience-driven framework” (ED framework) for supporting the career and life development of youth with vulnerabilities, which comprises four domains, namely recognition, exposures, self-growth, and transferability (REST). She suggested expanding the sources of recognition as a creative pathway to co-create with young people an enabling and inclusive environment to support them to dare to aspire and to achieve their aspirations. Informed by the intersubjective perspective and the capability approach, she has been expanding her research on workplace wellbeing and self-fulfillment of human helping professionals such as social workers, teachers, nurses, and youth workers. Conceptualization and operationalization are her sources of passions and she believes that theories, practice, teaching, policy, and research are interrelated and interlocking. She designed a tool called Map of Self-Perceived Growth (MSPG) to support both narrative research and career guidance and counseling, which highlights the agency of respondents in voicing out and mapping out their experiences with the use of emoji icons and a 10-point Likert scale in an archived manner. She has also developed some knowledge and skills to support human helping professionals to become more enabling and more empowering others to their service users. Moreover, based on the critiques of territorial sense of psychological phenomenon for causing territorial behaviors or even groupthink, Dr. Su developed a less-territorial notion of collective psychological ownership which consists of a general factor of co-ownership and two specific factors of shared decision making and shared hardship endurance. With support from her research partners, she launched a new non-exclusionary stream of studies about the psychological phenomenon of co-ownership in organizational contexts and revealed its associations with work engagement, burnout, job satisfaction, and turnover intention, etc.
Fields of expertise: Education, Inclusive social development / inclusive societies / social inclusion, Science policy, technology and innovation policy, Sustainable Development Goals, Youth