Relative Income and Subjective Well-Being of Urban Residents in China

Sources of Happiness: A Mixed Methods Phenomenological Study of Factors Affecting Residents’ Subjective Wellbeing in Shenzhen, China

“…Davey et al, 2009;Knight et al, 2009;Webb, 2009). These studies, and others that examined rural-urban differences and income inequality (e.g., Jiang et al, 2012;Smyth & Qian, 2008;Wang et al, 2019) suggest that, social comparisons and relative income (compared with that of the past or reference groups), along with perceptions of income inequality, aspirations, and religious (e.g., Buddhist philosophy) or spiritual beliefs (e.g., one should accept life with a peaceful mind, hardship leads to enlightenment) all influence SWB in Chinese residents.…”

“…A number of studies, including several based on population data (e.g., Han, 2015;Knight & Gunatilaka, 2010;Sun et al, 2016;Wang et al, 2019), documented positive associations between SWB and income, though Han (2015) found that, while income contributed to SWB among both urban and rural Chinese, it appeared to be a stronger predictor of urban residents' SWB. Relatedly, studies focus on rural residents' SWB found that, despite the poverty in rural China, people were generally satisfied with their lives (e.g.…”

Where your heart belongs to shapes how you feel about yourself: Migration, social comparison and subjective well‐being in China

“…Following previous studies (Chen, 2013; Chen, Liu, Zhu, & Li, 2017; Knight & Gunatilaka, 2010; Liu, Zhang, Wu, Liu, & Li, 2017), we included a set of covariates in the models, including age (continuous variable), gender (categorical variable), hukou (categorical variable), marital status (categorical variable), the length of residence in the host city (continuous variable), general self‐rated health (categorical variable), average working hours per day (continuous variable), participation in the Urban Basic Medical Insurance (categorical variable, including Urban Employee Medical Insurance and Urban Resident Medical Insurance), the logarithm of the area of cultivated land per household member (continuous variable) and self‐built housing area per household member (continuous variable). Additionally, it has been demonstrated that age has a U‐shaped relationship with SWB, so we included the square of age (centred on the grand mean) in the model (Clark, Yi, & Huang, 2019; Wang et al, 2019). Note that no concept was included in both the dependent variable (i.e., SWB) and the variables on the right‐hand side.In addition, we employed a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with the help of DAGitty v3.0 software (www.dagitty.net) to illustrate the relationship among variables (see Figure A1).…”

“…For example, a higher objective social economic status can better satisfy an individual's material needs and thereby increase their SWB. For another, it can influence their SWB through the relative social position they perceive in the process of social comparison (Wang, Yan, & Zhang, 2019). An increase in absolute income does not necessarily lead to a higher level of PSS due to the income growth of the whole society, and thus an increase in absolute income does not necessarily result in a higher level of SWB (Easterlin, 1974, 1995).…”

The Older, the Happier?: A Cross-Sectional Study on the “Paradox of Aging” in China

“…By contrast, the S-shaped relationship in the rural sample is consistent with growing evidence showing the influence of external environments in shaping older people's subjective well-being. There have been sustaining ruralurban gaps in income, infrastructures, and healthcare benefits in China (Wang et al, 2019). Specifically, rural older people Table 3.…”