Objective To examine the associations between living arrangements and the psychological well‐being and life satisfaction of Chinese older adults, as well as the mediating role of social support. Background China has the largest elderly population of any nation, and the country's overall population is rapidly aging. At the same time, China is experiencing substantial changes in living arrangements, particularly among older adults, that may have reshaped the types and sources of social support older adults receive. Method Using a nationally representative longitudinal dataset from 5 waves of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (N ≈ 5,000), we carried out structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine our research questions. Results Compared with elders living with their children, living alone was negatively associated with rural elders' life satisfaction, whereas urban elders living in nursing homes were more likely to be satisfied with their lives. Social support not only was important to elders' psychological well‐being and life satisfaction but also played some mediating role through receiving formal financial support. Conclusion Our results indicate that living arrangements had both direct and indirect effects (through social support) on older adults' psychological well‐being and life satisfaction. The mediating role played by social support differed by types and sources of social support. Implications Our results speak to the importance of providing social support from suitable sources for contemporary elders in China.
This study examined the association between grandparental co‐residence and child academic and behavioral outcomes using a sample from Shanghai, China (n = 1,763), and was built on two theoretical perspectives: intergenerational solidarity theory and the contextual model of family stress. These models integrate the impact of residential and relational proximity to grandparents on child well‐being and underscore the importance of family context. This study also explored the moderating effects of family resources using proxies that prior theoretical and empirical studies have found to be important to such associations: family income, parental education, hukou status, and subjective social status. Results indicated that among families without co‐residing grandparents, rural and low‐income parents reported their children to have more externalizing behavioral issues than their respective urban and non‐low‐income counterparts. In addition, children who resided in poorly resourced families (i.e., low family income, low parental education, low subjective social status, or rural hukou status) tended to benefit from living with grandparents compared to their well‐resourced counterparts in terms of lower externalizing and internalizing behaviors reported by teachers. These results do not negate the potential beneficial effects of living with grandparents for children in well‐resourced environments. Implications for practice and policy, as well as future research directions, are discussed.
Accurate acquisition of the spatiotemporal distribution of urban forests and fragmentation (e.g., interior and intact regions) is of great significance to contributing to the mitigation of climate change and the conservation of habitat biodiversity. However, the spatiotemporal pattern of urban forest cover changes related with the dynamics of interior and intact forests from the present to the future have rarely been characterized. We investigated fragmentation of urban forest cover using satellite observations and simulation models in the Nanjing Laoshan Region of Jiangbei New Area, Jiangsu, China, during 2002–2023. Object-oriented classification-based land cover maps were created to simulate land cover changes using the cellular automation-Markov chain (CA-Markov) model and the state transition simulation modeling. We then quantified the forest cover change by the morphological change detection algorithm and estimated the forest area density-based fragmentation patterns. Their relationships were built through the spatial analysis and statistical methods. Results showed that the overall accuracies of actual land cover maps were approximately 83.75–92.25% (2012–2017). The usefulness of a CA-Markov model for simulating land cover maps was demonstrated. The greatest proportion of forest with a low level of fragmentation was captured along with the decreasing percentage of fragmented area from 81.1% to 64.1% based on high spatial resolution data with the window size of 27 pixels × 27 pixels. The greatest increase in fragmentation (3% from 2016 to 2023) among the changes between intact and fragmented forest was reported. However, intact forest was modeled to have recovered in 2023 and restored to 2002 fragmentation levels. Moreover, we found 58.07 km2 and 0.35 km2 of interior and intact forests have been removed from forest area losses and added from forest area gains. The loss rate of forest interior and intact area exceeded the rate of total forest area loss. However, their approximate ratio (1) implying the loss of forest interior and intact area would have slight fragmentation effects on the remaining forests. This analysis illustrates the achievement of protecting and restoring forest interior; more importantly, excessive human activities in the surrounding area had been avoided. This study provides strategies for future forest conservation and management in large urban regions.
Subjective well-being in later life is important to individuals, their families, and society, because it dictates how we think, feel, and behave [1]. However, studies in China have found that Chinese older adult's subjective well-being is much worse compared to 20 years ago [2]. This decrease may be due to methodological differences, but it may also reflect changes in social support that China has experienced in recent years. Chinese culture (i.e., the Confucian norm of filial piety) expects adult children to be the primary providers of support for their older parents by living with them [3]. However, significant societal and economic transitions (e.g., children's migration, one-child policy) since the 1980s have weakened the traditional social support pattern of older adults [4,5]. Empirical studies conducted during the past several decades have focused on the relationship between social support and subjective wellbeing among Chinese older adults. The majority of them explored the main effect of social support on Chinese older adults' subjective well-being. They found that having a bigger social network (e.g., more friends), receiving assistance or financial aid when needed, and frequent contact with others were positively associated with Chinese older adults' subjective wellbeing in China [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Some studies using Chinese samples also examine the relationship between sources of social support and older adults' subjective well-being. Most of them focused on children's support and generally found that it was beneficial to Chinese older adults' subjective wellbeing [3,[18][19][20]. Studies examining the relationship between support from non-child sources and subjective well-being among Chinese older adults have been relatively scant and found mixed results. For example, some studies reported a positive relationship between friendship and subjective well-being among Chinese older adults [14,[21][22][23][24] whereas others found no significant relationship between friends' support and subjective well-being [25,26]. In addition, although the stress-buffering model [27] is one of the dominating theories regarding social support, the potential stress-buffering role of social support for Chinese older adults' subjective well-being has been largely overlooked in the literature. Very few studies using Chinese older adult samples have examined the stress-buffering effect of social support, and they found family support had a stress-buffering effect, whereas support from friends did not [13,[28][29][30]. Overall, although many empirical studies have examined the relationship between social support and Chinese older adults' subjective well-being, some knowledge gaps need to be addressed. First, the buffering effect of social support has been far less studied in this research area. Second, support from non-child sources (e.g., spouse, neighbors, friends, or professional services) has been overlooked, a critical gap considering changes in living arrangements among Chinese older adults fro...
Land cover changes are the main factors driving the evolution of regional ecological quality. These changes must be considered in the strategic formulation of regional or national ecological policies. The forest-steppe ecotone in the Greater Khingan Mountains is an important ecological barrier in northern China. To measure the effect of ecological protection in recent years, Landsat images, object-oriented image segmentation, and convolutional neural networks were used to create land cover datasets of the forest-steppe ecotone. The Carnegie–Ames–Stanford approach (CASA) and the dimidiate pixel model were used to derive net primary productivity (NPP) and fractional vegetation cover (FVC) to assess the ecological quality of this area. The results showed that only grassland and urban land increased, whereas saline–alkali land and desert areas initially increased and then decreased from 2010 to 2018, indicating that the desertification process was substantially curbed. Total NPP increased by 26.3% (2000–2010) and 10.8% (2010–2018). However, NPP decreased slightly in the center of the study area. FVC first decreased and then increased, and the increased areas were concentrated in the forest-steppe ecotone, saline–alkali land, and desert zone in Xin Barag Left Banner. These observations indicate that the ecological quality has gradually improved due to the strict protection of forest and grassland resources and the suppression of desertification. Our results provide potential insights for land use planning and the development of environmental protection measures in the forest-steppe ecotone.
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