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Social Indicators Research

Erschienen in:

01.04.2014

The Time Trend of Life Satisfaction in China

verfasst von: Jiayuan Li, John W. Raine

Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research | Ausgabe 2/2014

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Abstract

The overtime changes of life satisfaction have been recognized as an important topic in happiness studies. Unfortunately, most of prior research is confined to Western industrialized countries. A few studies focused on the case of China yet fail to reach a general agreement. This research aims to synthesize multiple national representative samples implemented in China by standardizing the happiness scores. The transformation of datasets yields more observation points and grounds the analysis in much larger samples, which helps to represent a country as vast as China. The analysis shows that in the past two decades, Chinese people has been experiencing a marked decline of life satisfaction, in spite of tremendous economic and societal progress.

Vorheriger Artikel Weekends and Subjective Well-Being

Nächster Artikel The Latent Profiles of Life Domain Importance and Satisfaction in a Quality of Life Scale

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In this research, happiness, life satisfaction and subjective well-being are used interchangeably, also note that Easterlin Paradox and happiness-income paradox are viewed as synonyms.

Perhaps the most reassuring evidence of the validity of such subjective data is that happiness models share a similar equation across a set of countries and over time. See Di Tella and MacCulloch (2008) for more details.

Given most of surveys were conducted after 2000, we also consulted authoritative experts in the field of happiness in China for any unnoticed datasets, and the consulting confirmed our own search.

Note that there are two differences between our use of Horizon’s data with Easterlin et al. (2012). Firstly, they used the results of urban sample, while we took the whole sample. Meanwhile, consulting the Horizon Company, we analyzed the survey results after 2000.

Note although all the surveys listed in the table purported to get a national representative sample, with the exception of CGSS, the sample was disproportionately urban residents. Descriptions of datasets in details are put in “Appendix”.

It is not uncommon in happiness literature to combine different types of measures of subjective well-being together and produce a “happiness” index. See Lane (2001) and Inglehart et al. (2008b) for example. Such a combination is appropriate since what they measures were fairly interrelated.

We use the same happiness scores by synthesizing three types of measure, as the data presented in Fig. 5.

It was unnecessary to do more bivariate analyses with additional economic indicators because China generally performs well with regard to a wide range of measure.

We calculated the raw average based on WVS, Pew and CGSS which individual responses are available.

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Titel: The Time Trend of Life Satisfaction in China
verfasst von: Jiayuan Li
John W. Raine
Publikationsdatum: 01.04.2014
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research / Ausgabe 2/2014
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-013-0300-4

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