Advances in Social Behavior Research
Vol. 6, 28 March 2024
Open
Access | Article
Migrants’ Subjective Well-being in Big Cities of China: Based on Self-rating Social Status and Social Integration
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Abstract
Promoting subject well-being of migrants could give full play to the advantages of talent's resource. Social position and social inclusion of migrants could be the key to pursue a people-centered, new type of urbanization and bring about rural migrants’ settling in cities. There is a lack of studies focusing on social comparison and social inclusion of migrants with the point of geographical features. Using the data collected from China Migrants Dynamic Survey in 2014, the relations among object socioeconomic status and self-rating social status as well as subject well-being of migrants in one municipal district and seven prefecture-level cities of China was examined by adopting multilevel linear regression model, which includes both mediating variables and moderating variables. Several conclusions are drawn as follows: 1) Migrants’ subjective well-being is affected by their objective socioeconomic status. Whilst migrants’ comparing themselves with local relatives and colleagues, as we call it self-rating social status, plays a part in mediating relations between object socioeconomic status and subject well-being, especially when the object socioeconomic status refers to migrants’ household monthly income, certain types of occupations (including civil servants, clerks and the self-rated) and homeowners in the host city. 2) When compared their socioeconomic status with locals in the host cities, including economic status and respect for themselves, the deeper the migrants are merging into cities and social networks, the weaker the relationship between self-rating social status and subjective well-being will be. In other words, social inclusion among migrants do negatively regulates the relations above. 3) However, there is no evidence that the higher the acceptance degree of local residents in host cities to migrants, the deeper the impact of the respect for migrants on subjective well-being will be. Obviously, the acceptance degree of local residents could not significantly moderate the relations between respect for migrants and their subject well-being. Based on the above research conclusions, this paper suggests that for building a harmonious society and improving the quality of urbanization, equal treatment of migrants and locals should be identified and dealt with. Furthermore, Therefore, we must speed up migrants to blend into the society in the cities.
Keywords
subjective well-being, migrant population, social comparison, social integration, China
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- ISBN (Print)
- ISBN (Online)
- Published Date
- 28 March 2024
- Series
- Advances in Social Behavior Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7102
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7110
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7102/6/2024045
- Copyright
- © 2023 The Author(s)
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited