ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how recent immigrants use their social relations to obtain social support, using the concept of embeddedness. The concept of embeddedness has been used widely in sociological literature. Embeddedness refers to individuals engaging in social relations that nurture social capital, which in turn makes current and future social and economic exchange possible. The notion that social relations can be affected by the embeddedness of individuals, both respondents and network members, is not new in social science. The chapter provides a recent data set collected in Hong Kong to evaluate how the embeddedness levels of recent immigrants and members of their social networks are related to their use of social relations to obtain resources. The survey sampled five districts with higher concentrations of recent immigrants from mainland China: the Eastern district of Hong Kong Island, Sham Shui Pao and Kwan Tong in the Kowloon peninsula, and Kwai Tsing and Yuen Long in the New Territories.
