Well-being Of Rural Migrant Workers In China: A Longitudinal Analysis
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2019
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Based on China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) data, my dissertation mainly examined psychological distress and life satisfaction of rural migrant workers in China and their associations with conflictual experiences as well as explored the associations over time and across regions. Results based on Latent Difference Scores (LDS) models show that having conflictual experiences was positively associated with psychological distress and negatively associated with life satisfaction among rural migrant workers. A significant decrease in conflictual experiences, a significant increase in psychological distress, and a significant increase in life satisfaction were identified. In addition, change in conflictual experiences was significantly associated with change in psychological distress and change in life satisfaction from 2010 to 2014. Moreover, conflictual experiences assessed at baseline explained the subsequent change of psychological distress and vice versa. Conflictual experiences showed a leading role in predicting the subsequent change of psychological distress. However, conflictual experiences measured at baseline was not significantly associated with a subsequent change in life satisfaction and life satisfaction measured at baseline was also not significantly associated with a subsequent change in conflictual experiences. To explain this finding, I argued that economic gain might confound the effects between these two factors. Based on the follow-up Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analyses, I confirmed that economic gain could alleviate the detrimental effect of conflictual experiences on life satisfaction. But this stress-buffering effect was only salient among male migrant workers but not among female migrant workers. Finally, I linked CFPS baseline wave data with regional level data to examine the variation of well-being indicators (psychological distress and life satisfaction) across regions as well as the direct effect of regional level characteristics on individual well-being indicators. I also examined whether the associations between conflictual experiences and well-being indicators vary across regions and how regional level indicators modify these associations. Results show that, although there were significant variations of psychological distress and life satisfaction across regions, regional differences only contribute to small proportions of overall variance of well-being. Moreover, the strength of the positive association between conflictual experiences and psychological distress as well as the strength of the negative association between conflictual experiences and life satisfaction do vary across regions. Specifically, regions with higher Expenditure on People’s Livelihood (EPL) and Disposable Personal Income (DPI) tend to show a weaker association between conflictual experiences and psychological distress compared to regions with lower EPL and DPI. Regions with higher GDP per capital (GDPPC) tend to show a stronger positive association between conflictual experiences and psychological distress as well as a stronger negative association between conflictual experiences and life satisfaction than regions with lower GDPPC. Interpretation of these results and possible implications as well as future research directions were also discussed in this dissertation.
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Sociology
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China
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