Different types of intergenerational support are associated with elderly parents' life satisfaction in different patterns.

This study aims to investigate into the determinants of poverty in Hong Kong. Previous research on poverty, which usually adopted a logistic regression model to examine individuals' probabilities of being poor, could not adequately reveal the heterogeneity in experiences among people across the poverty spectrum, therefore has limited policy effort to address diverse needs of individuals struggling with poverty. In the present study, this concern is addressed by using a quantile regression model to examine the differential effects of the determinants of poverty across the poverty spectrum. Data were drawn from the Hong Kong Panel Survey for Poverty Alleviation (n = 1668). Logistic regression indicated that being elderly, being female, not having a partner, from a single-parent household, not being employed, living in public rental housing, have lower educational attainment, and have poor self-rated health, increased the probability of being poor. Informational support was a protective factor of poverty, while several negative life events, such as having family member(s) with disabilities/chronic diseases and having financial burden, were risk factors of poverty. Quantile regression analysis was adopted to further examine the extent to which determinants of poverty unfold across poverty spectrum, which was captured by five groups of "extremely poor", "deeply poor", "at the poverty line", "near poverty" and "marginally poor". Quantile regression indicated that people living across the poverty spectrum were similarly affected by not having a partner, living in single-parent households and not working. However, extremely poor and deeply poor were more adversely affected by old age than those near poverty and marginally poor. It is also discovered that public rental housing buffered the poverty risks more in those who lived in deep poverty than those who were near poverty and marginally poor. University education protected the near poverty and marginally poor to a larger extent than those who were extremely poor and deeply poor. Information support also buffered the poverty risks, and people living across the poverty spectrum were equally benefited from it.

No abstract

This study examined a new emotional writing paradigm, that is PDDP. PDDP instructs participants to write diary in first-person pronoun first, and then narrate the same event from a different perspective using second-person pronoun. Finally, the participants write it again with third-person pronoun from yet another perspective. These three narrations were to be written in a consecutive sequential order. Results demonstrated that diary writers indeed benefited from features of PDDP. It also showed that highly anxious people received most long-term therapeutic effect from PDDP. We argue that PDDP enacts the needed mechanism to balance psychological distance prolonging and self-disclosure making in emotional writing.

No abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an unprecedented number of policy responses around the world across multiple policy domains. While governments have combined containment and health policies with social policies (CHSP) during the initial phase of the pandemic in various ways, current literature offers little knowledge of the patterns of these combinations and their determinants and outcomes. This paper fills this gap by investigating CHSP combinations across more than 120 countries. We further examined whether the CHSP policy response was determined by political regimes or compensation hypotheses—serving the purposes of responding to pre-existing economic downturns, inequality, or social unrest. We also investigated the associations between CHSP responses and mobility, virus infection, and unemployment. Using policy data from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, results from sequence analysis indicated that governments’ CHSP responses could be clustered into five categories: high social policies (SP), middle SP, containment and health (CH) leading SP, low SP, and gradual high SP. We used multinomial regression models to investigate determinants of CHSP responses. We found that CHSP policy responses did not differ by political regime, and CHSP combinations were not driven by compensation hypotheses. Instead, GDP per capita and government effectiveness were the key drivers for high levels of policy responses. We also found that low SP responses were associated with fewer mobility changes. Taken together, our findings suggest that lower income countries required more support and resources in order for them to adopt necessary CH and SP responses.

No abstract

What are the various ways in which local governments in China accommodate migrants through housing policies, and what are the forces that drive these variations? Through systematic coding of policy documents from 97 prefecture-level cities, this study captures the patterns of migrant housing policies using cluster analysis. We found that 18.6 per cent of the cities adopted a residual approach. Most cities adopted a rental-based approach (public and private rental, and collective rental) that could only meet migrants’ short-term housing needs. Only a few cities (12.4 per cent) adopted a citizenship-oriented approach, which best fits the central government's overarching goal of facilitating migrant workers’ long-term settlement in the host cities. Regression analyses examining the determinants of local migrant housing policies showed that the policy variations were not only shaped by economic and political concerns but also the salience of urban issues (problem-solving functions) and previous welfare generosity (path-dependency tendencies).