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This article was submitted to Personality and Social Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
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Although previous investigations have agreed that Chinese rural-to-urban migrants’ socioeconomic status (SES) increases with their migration, the association between SES and subjective well-being is uncertain. To address this research gap, the present study proposed that the association between objective SES and subjective well-being is mediated by subjective SES. This model was tested with a sample of 432 Chinese rural-to-urban migrants. The results indicate a significant association between objective SES and subjective well-being and a partial mediating effect of subjective SES. Furthermore, subjective social mobility, which is one’s expectation about the possibility to move upward in the social hierarchy, was found to moderate both the direct path from objective SES to subjective well-being and the indirect path from subjective SES to subjective well-being. These findings suggest that Chinese rural-to-urban migrants gained in subjective well-being not only because of direct financial achievement but also because of their perceptions and beliefs about their relative social status.
Millions of Chinese rural-to-urban migrants have played an important role in maintaining China as the world’s fastest-growing major economy and leading the world to economic recovery following the recent global recession (
A number of empirical investigations have shown that migrants’ SES has increased with migration in recent decades. Based on the national investigation bulletin in 2014, almost all the observable measures of migrants’ SES, including income, employment, living conditions, and welfare, have improved significantly in the past decades (
Despite the high attention paid to the observable socio-economic achievements described above, whether attaining higher SES leads to an increased feeling of well-being is a far more important social issue (
However, increasing evidence has suggested that SES has only a negligible impact on migrants’ subjective well-being. Recent studies found that migrants’ subjective well-being did not differ significantly from that of rural residents (
Therefore, there may exist variables that mediate or moderate the effect of SES on migrants’ subjective well-being. Here, we present a potential explanation for the contradictory findings: that previous studies focused mainly on the observable measurements of SES, or so-called objective SES (
Objective SES is the economic and social position in relation to others, which is widely measured by using three indicators: income, education, and occupation. In contrast, subjective SES is a person’s conception of his or her position compared with that of others (
In support of this line of findings, an increasing number of investigations have found that compared with objective SES, subjective SES exhibits a more stable and intense association with psychological functioning, such as negative affectivity, stress, and pessimism (
A further hypothesis is that subjective social mobility may serve as a moderating factor. Subjective social mobility is defined as people’s subjective belief that they have a higher probability to reach a higher social class in future, especially in comparison to their parents’ positions (
There were three eligibility criteria for selecting participants in the present study: (1) their ages range from 18 to 60 years old. Most migrants more than 60 years old are retirees or return to their hometown in China. This limit was set to avoid a sampling bias. (2) They work or stay in Beijing without a permanent
The investigation was conducted in 2014 in the Haidian and Changping districts in Beijing, two districts primarily inhabited by rural-to-urban migrants. Trained interviewers met participants on streets and identified participants with the above criteria. All participants who consented to participate were requested to subsequently complete the anonymous questionnaire and received a small amount of compensation (about $5) for their participation. Interviewers read the items aloud to some illiterate participants, and the participants provided oral answers to the interviewers, who faithfully recorded the answers in questionnaires. The total process took approximately 50 min, and the whole study was completed in 2 weeks. The investigation protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Boards at Beijing Normal University and Central University of Finance and Economics in China.
Participants’ background information including age, gender, marital status (i.e., unmarried, married, divorced, and widowed), and
Participants’ subjective well-being was measured by the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) and the Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS). The SWLS includes five items assessing overall self-judgments of respondents’ lives (
The PANAS includes a positive affect scale (PAS) and a negative affect scale (NAS), which surveyed whether participants frequently experienced certain emotions recently (
As in previous research (
Objective SES was indexed by personal monthly income in the present study because migrants’ income is a significant consequence of migration (
We adopted the MacArthur Scale to assess migrants’ subjective SES (
The six-item subjective social mobility scale (
Previous literature has suggested that gender, marital status, and age may be effective predictors of subjective well-being (
The first analysis was conducted to test the associations between objective SES, subjective SES, subjective social mobility, and subjective well-being among migrants. The second analysis examined the model that subjective SES mediates the effect of objective SES on subjective well-being. The third analysis tested the models that subjective social mobility moderates the direct effect of objective SES on subjective well-being and the indirect effect of objective SES on subjective well-being through subjective SES.
We used IBM SPSS version 19 to perform the correlation analyses. For the latter two analyses, we used the PROCESS macro
Descriptive statistics and zero-order correlations of main variables (
Variables | 1 | 2 | 3 | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
(1) Objective socioeconomic status | 8.25 | 0.65 | – | – | |
(2) Subjective socioeconomic status | 4.94 | 2.36 | 0.12∗ | – | – |
(3) Subjective social mobility | 3.46 | 0.86 | 0.10∗ | 0.22∗∗∗ | – |
(4) Subjective well-being | 0.00 | 2.03 | 0.14∗∗ | 0.15∗∗∗ | 0.33∗∗∗ |
We found that the mediation model was significant; γ = 0.04,
The mediation model tested in
The present study examined the associations between objective SES, subjective SES and subjective well-being and the moderating role of subjective social mobility among Chinese rural-to-urban migrants. In accordance with previous findings, the direct effect of objective SES on subjective well-being was significant. Additionally, in line with our hypothesis, the mediating role of subjective SES on the correlation between objective SES and subjective well-being was significant. Migrants with higher levels of objective SES might also experience higher levels of subjective SES, further providing an increase in their subjective well-being. Furthermore, we found that subjective social mobility moderates both the direct path from objective SES to subjective well-being and the indirect path from subjective SES to subjective well-being. Specifically, the direct and positive effect of objective SES on subjective well-being is only salient for migrants with higher social mobility belief. However, the indirect effect of objective SES on subjective well-being through subjective SES is only significant for the lower subjective social mobility group.
The present results confirm that attaining higher objective SES could effectively improve Chinese rural-to-urban migrants’ subjective well-being, consistent with previous investigations (
In addition, our findings further uncovered a mediating role of subjective SES in the association between objective SES and subjective well-being. While most previous studies focused on the material consequences of migration, especially on income and employment (
However, although the correlation between objective SES and subjective SES remained significant even after the Benjamini–Hochberg procedure was applied to control for the Type I error accumulation, the coefficient was very low. There are three possible reasons for this result. First, objective SES and subjective SES may represent different aspects of one’s SES. The former measures how much one actually possesses, while the latter is how much one believes he or she possesses relative to others (
In addition, the mediating effect of subjective SES in the present study is much weaker than the direct effect of objective SES. One possible reason is the presence of other mediating factors. For example, recent studies consistently found that compared with SES, sociometric status (defined as the level of respect and admiration individuals attain in society) had a significant impact on subjective well-being (
To date, no research has examined the effects of subjective social mobility on subjective well-being among Chinese rural-to-urban migrants. However, the present finding is in line with previous studies documenting the positive effect of subjective social mobility on subjective well-being among residential participants (
It is intriguing that subjective social mobility exhibited differential moderating effects on the above direct and indirect paths. Compared with migrants reporting lower levels of subjective social mobility, the effect of objective SES on subjective well-being only displayed significance among those reporting higher levels of subjective social mobility. However, the significant effect of subjective SES on subjective well-being was only present for migrants reporting lower levels of subjective social mobility. These findings provide an effective explanation for the controversy about the relationship between SES and subjective well-being among migrants. It is possible that someone holding a stronger sense of social mobility may concentrate more on observable achievements that could evidence their “success.” In contrast, someone with weaker subjective social mobility may rely on more subjective feelings. Either way, migrants can appreciate an elevated sense of subjective well-being. We believe there may be more factors such as subjective social mobility awaiting future investigations that add to the complexity of the impact of SES on subjective well-being.
Some caveats must be addressed in interpreting the present results. First, we analyzed our results using a set of cross-sectional data; thus, the causality in the associations found in this study is uncertain. The results suggest remarkable tendencies, but causal relationships between these variables should be confirmed by replications and be examined by longitudinal and experimental (intervention) research in the future. Second, as shown above, only using income to represent objective SES may cause a low correlation between objective and subjective SES. The three indices of SES—educational attainment, occupation, and household income—should all be included to avoid conflicts in future research. Third, although we distinguished subjective SES from objective SES, these measures still focused on the material form of social status. As suggested by other researchers, sociometric status is an alternative dimension of social status, reflecting the levels of respect and appreciation one achieves in society. Previous investigations have found that sociometric status has a stronger effect on subjective well-being than does SES (
The present study confirmed the significant and positive association between objective SES and subjective well-being and further showed that subjective SES partially mediated this relationship among Chinese rural-to-urban migrants. Additionally, the moderating roles of subjective social mobility were present both on the direct path from objective SES to subjective well-being and the indirect path from subjective SES to subjective well-being.
This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of Beijing Normal University committee with written informed consent from all subjects. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the Beijing Normal University committee.
SH, JH, and HZ conceived and designed the study. SH, JH, LS, HZ, and DD performed the investigation. SH executed the statistical analyses. SH completed the manuscript. HZ, SH, and XL modified the manuscript.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.