Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change 9819922208, 9789819922208

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Peigang Wang

Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change Translated by Liying Hao

Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change

Peigang Wang

Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change

Peigang Wang School of Public Health Wuhan University Wuhan, Hubei, China Translated by Liying Hao Shijiazhuang, Hebei, China

ISBN 978-981-99-2220-8 ISBN 978-981-99-2221-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2221-5 Jointly published with Social Sciences Academic Press The print edition is not for sale in China (Mainland). Customers from China (Mainland) please order the print book from: Social Sciences Academic Press. Translation from the Chinese language edition: 《 “ 社会变迁与中国居民生活质量》 ” by Peigang Wang, © Social Sciences Academic Press 2018. Published by Social Sciences Academic Press. All Rights Reserved. © Social Sciences Academic Press 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publishers, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publishers nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publishers remain neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Contents

1 Significance, Concepts and Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Research on Quality of Life: Social Demand and Policy Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Discussion on Categories Related to the Research on Quality of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 The Basic Structure and Research Content of This Book . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Literature Review of Research on Quality of Life in China and Western Countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Literature Review of Research on Quality of Life in Western Countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Literature Review of Research on Quality of Life in China . . . . . . . 2.3 Dispute on Methodologies Used in Current Research on Quality of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Theory of Quality of Life and Its Development in the Course of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Discussion About the Early Theories of Quality of Life . . . . . . 3.2 The Utilitarian Approach to the Research on Quality of Life . . . . . . 3.3 The Prudential Value Approach to the Research on Quality of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 The Capability Approach to the Research on Quality of Life . . . . . . 3.5 Summary of the Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The Diagnosis of the Structural Classification Scheme of Subjective Well-Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Literature Review and Hypotheses of the Structure of Subjective Well-Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Variable Design and Research Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4.3 Empirical Analysis and Research Findings on the Structure of Subjective Well-Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Discussion on the Structure of Subjective Well-Being . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

68 75 78

5 Empirical Research on Factors Related to the Subjective Well-Being of Chinese Urban Residents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Data Sources and Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Discussion on the Factors Affecting Subjective Well-Being . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

81 83 86 90 93

6 Research on Differences in Subjective Well-Being of Chinese Urban and Rural Residents and Its Influencing Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 6.1 Literature Review and Hypotheses of the Subjective Well-Being of Urban and Rural Residents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 6.2 Variable Selection and Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 6.3 An Empirical Research of Subjective Well-Being from the Perspective of Utilitarianism and Prudential Value . . . . . . . 100 6.4 Discussion on the Subjective Well-Being of Urban and Rural Residents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 7 Research on the Influencing Mechanisms of Leisure Style on Quality of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Literature Review and Research of the Relationship Between Leisure Style and Quality of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Data and Research Methods of Leisure Style and Quality of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Empirical Analysis and Findings on the Relationship Between Leisure Style and Quality of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Discussion on the Relationship Between Leisure Style and Quality of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 A Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Social Change and Happiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Literature Review of the Changing Patterns of Happiness . . . . . . . . . 8.3 Research Design and Research Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Laws of Change and the Influencing Mechanisms of Chinese Residents’ Happiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5 Conclusions and Discussions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

111 111 114 117 123 125 129 129 130 133 134 140 144

Contents

9 Critical Dimensions and Future Prospects of Research on Quality of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 Reflection and Enlightment: Critical Dimensions of the Research on Quality of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Future Prospects: Issues to be Solved in the Research on Quality of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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147 147 152 155

Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

Chapter 1

Significance, Concepts and Framework

At a certain level of economic development and material living standards, quality of life rightfully becomes the ultimate goal of social development. A harmonious, wealthy and peaceful society is an embodiment of a relatively higher quality of life. This chapter first explores society’s need for research on quality of life and the policy response of a harmonious society towards quality of life. Thereafter, we identify the distinctions and relationships between core concepts such as quality of life, subjective well-being and life satisfaction, before finally introducing and describing the framework and key content of each chapter.

1.1 Research on Quality of Life: Social Demand and Policy Response (1) Stronger research on and assessment of quality of life is an inevitable consequence of social development The concept of “quality of life” was first proposed by the American economic Galbraith in his 1958 book The Affluent Society. The World Summit for Social Development, held in Copenhagen in 1995, further refined this concept, noting that the ultimate goal of social development was to increase and enhance the quality of life of all people; that quality of life was the means by which the value of social progress was measured; and that improving and enhancing the quality of life of all people was a mark of social progress. Thus, the prosperity and development of society should be based on the assessment of quality of life, in order to satisfy people’s demand for all-round development. 1. Improving the quality of life is the core and goal of coordinated socioeconomic development After the end of the Second World War, some major Western nations, after revival from the war, implemented reforms that quickened the pace of economic development © Social Sciences Academic Press 2023 P. Wang, Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2221-5_1

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and brought about unprecedented growth in economic output. However, this growth in economic output did not bring about prosperity and development on the societal level—there was no corresponding increase in the quality of life—but instead led in vain to several social problems. For instance, problems such as the wealth divide, environmental pollution, poor law and order, ethnic discrimination and unequal political rights were once fairly serious. Against this backdrop, some Western sociologists became aware of the importance of harmonious socioeconomic development and launched the Social Indicators Movement, leading to a mushrooming of studies on quality of life. China’s economy has grown at an average annual rate of 7% in recent years, drawing global attention to the “China model.” The series of reports issued by the National Bureau of Statistics in 2009 pointed out that, in the sixty years since the People’s Republic was founded, China’s GDP has grown at an average annual rate of 8.1% and its economy had grown seventy-seven-fold to become the world’s third-largest. China’s GDP reached US$ 5.879 trillion in 2010, exceeding Japan’s US$ 404.4 billion, officially becoming the world’s second-largest economy. Based on World Bank classification standards, China had progressed from a low-income country to a lower-middle-income country by 2008. Reforms implemented over the past thirty-odd years have brought profound changes to China’s socioeconomic structure, along with great improvements and enhancements to the living conditions and standards of the Chinese people. There have been continuous structural optimization and improvements in China’s industries, technologies, income distribution, consumer spending, and population, mainly manifesting in the significant increase in disposable income, greater agricultural subsidies, rise in basic living standards, better environmental governance, better healthcare services, and accelerated progress in democratic governance. It can be said that improvements to quality of life can be felt in several aspects of China’s society and economy. However, even with significant improvements in quality of life in China, we should also be aware that there are many imbalances in present socioeconomic development. For instance, the imbalance between continued population growth and limited resources; the imbalance between the requirements of rapid economic growth for highly skilled workers caused by inadequacies in technology and education; and the co-existence of rapid economic growth with rising inflation and living costs. However, it is a happy sign that, even while vigorously developing its economy, China has come to put greater store upon social development, improvement of the people’s livelihoods, expansion of public services, improvements to social administration, advancements in social equality, and developing the vision of a society where everyone has access to education, employment, medical services, elderly care, and housing. In particular, the development of a society that focuses on improving the people’s livelihood is key to addressing problems directly related to the welfare and pragmatic interests of the general public, for instance education, employment, income distribution, social security, and healthcare, and will also help to increase levels of subjective well-being. The third plenary session of the 16th CPC Central Committee put forth the requirement to study and practice the Scientific Outlook on Development that aims at

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comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable development that puts people first. This people-centered outlook stresses all-round human development, which includes the satisfaction of the people’s needs in relation to their material, social, spiritual, and political lives, allowing them to reach their full physical and intellectual potential. Meanwhile, quality of life is a comprehensive reflection of social development as well as the ultimate indicator for its measurement. Thus, satisfying all-round human development is an important measure for evaluating quality of life, as well as a fundamental reflection of the practice of the Scientific Outlook on Development. A Scientific Outlook on Development that puts people first requires that we focus more attention on boosting human capital, expanding the capacity to provide public services, enhance the quality and level of public services, strengthen rural social development efforts, protect the basic interests of vulnerable groups, and enable all urban and rural residents to share in basic public services even while maintaining rapid and sound economic development. Building a moderately prosperous society in all respects is not only about economic growth, but also achieving all-round social progress by building upon economic development. It is about applying the ideals of social justice to each and every aspect of socialist institutions with Chinese characteristics, such that the entire populace, especially vulnerable groups, can share in the fruits of social development. Emphasizing quality of life that reflects coordinated socioeconomic development does not mean giving up the pursuit of the material economy, but rather that the pursuit of GDP is no longer regarded as the sole objective, while also emphasizing the formation of a happiness index. While recognizing that a certain material foundation is necessary for modern life, greater emphasis should be placed on autonomy and meaning in work. Rates of participation in political life and equality in opportunity and rights should be emphasized. Diversity of leisure activities should be stressed and the spiritual and cultural needs of the people should be adequately met. In short, the substance of an outlook on quality of life that reflects coordinated socioeconomic development lies in the shift of social dynamics from a mere focus on material factors to a focus on human development; a shift from a one-sided emphasis on the quantity of material goods to a focus on meaning and satisfaction derived from work, consumption, and political and spiritual life; and a pursuit of balanced and comprehensive enhancement to the quality of life (Qin & Zhu, 1988). 2. Evaluation of quality of life is a test and compass for coordinated socioeconomic development The measurement and assessment of quality of life must consider the ability and level of material products and various services with respect to socioeconomic development as well as the actual sentiments and expectations of the people. Since quality of life is related to material living conditions, it is also closely related to subjective well-being. Quality of life can be scientifically and soundly reflected only when the two are adequately considered in combination. As a result, building an assessment system oriented towards the quality of life becomes an important indicator and navigation marker for testing if socioeconomic development is balanced. The

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important functions of assessing quality of life to China’s coordinated socioeconomic development are reflected in: (1) deepening our understanding and study of the relationships between various socioeconomic phenomena to serve the formulation of macro policy and social planning; (2) monitoring the effects of socioeconomic policies and the current state and trends of socioeconomic development; (3) understanding the various problems that may or have already arisen in various regions, sectors or industries during the course of socioeconomic development, in order to timely provide information and consultation services for necessary macroeconomic control and effective social governance. The 2005 China Residents’ Quality of Life Survey Report released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences indicates that overall life satisfaction in China had declined somewhat even though urban and rural living standards have risen continuously, with more residents grading their overall life satisfaction as “average.” Why was there an increase in the number of citizens feeling unhappy or dissatisfied despite sustained economic growth? There are a number of reasons. First, have living standards increased more quickly or slowly than increases in living costs faced by the middle class and life pressures borne by low-income groups? If life satisfaction is in a state of “relative decline”, this indicates that the speed of the former is lower than the latter. It may be that growth in urban wages or rural disposable income is slower than economic growth. Of course, we cannot completely rule out factors such as damage to civility caused by rapid economic growth, damage to interpersonal relations caused by impetuosity or greater social pressures. Second, rapid societal transformation and greater living costs have also allowed “multiple frames of reference” to play a role. In other words, quality of life is not only closely correlated with objective material conditions, but also the “livingenvironment frames of reference”: (1) frames of reference based on some envisioned “ideal state”; (2) frames of reference based on one’s peers; (3) frames of reference based on one’s past circumstances. Any actual circumstance that is deemed “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” is fundamentally a functional expression of one or more of the above reference systems. For instance, in (3), if people compare their present living standards with the past, surely, they would feel more satisfied or happy. However, relevant psychological and economic studies tell us that people generally compare their present circumstances with future life expectations. When comparing their present income with future housing, healthcare, and their children’s education expenditures, they would feel financially pressurized and “relatively poor.” The above comparisons are comparisons made by an individual with regards to the course of their lives. There is also a form of comparison where peers are the target of a reference, i.e. (2). Even if income levels are rising across the board, a sizeable number of people would helplessly find that they are relatively deprived, with their circumstances remaining stagnant even as the circumstances of their peers improve rapidly. While the market-based economy has greatly increased the efficiency of private production and vastly improved living standards, it has created inequities in social allocation. Given the fact of income inequality, without government intervention to redistribute income, every single individual would have to use their own income to pay for the public goods that they receive. The result would be that some

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would inevitably find that their income cannot meet these outlays, creating a crisis of legitimacy in social institutions. The goal theory in the science of happiness argues that subjective well-being is generated when goals are met. Hence, different values and desires lead to different levels of subjective well-being. Researchers, like Karf, argue that progress towards a goal above the desired standard generates positive emotions, while progress below generates negative ones. Gross National Happiness is now used by an increasing number of countries, as well as the UN, to calculate and assess the value of economic development. The eruption of popular sentiment, expectations of harmonious socioeconomic development, and fundamental changes in the core values of the international community all require that economic development shifts its focus from quantity to quality and thereby attain the goal of enhancing livelihoods and welfare. At a certain level, the significance of national happiness lies in citizens’ life satisfaction. It is not only a representation of the value of life, but also a reflection of the core competitiveness of a country. In this sense, changes in overall life satisfaction deserve our great concern. Happiness is an eternal yet constantly renewed topic and the goal of human life and endeavor. As society continues to progress, the desire to pursue happiness will become ever stronger, creating greater prospects for research in this field and its application value. 3. Research on quality of life is a precondition and requirement of harmonious socioeconomic development There is important practical significance in studying subjective quality of life, in particular subjective well-being, given that it provides an analytical tool for measuring the subjective quality of life of Chinese residents. The structural transformation of Chinese urban society has accelerated in recent years. Institutional reforms in various sectors continue to impact vested interests, the social divide continues to grow, and conflict between social groups shows trends of intensifying. In particular, wealth gap grows with each passing day. In terms of social psychology, people will develop higher-level needs of ever greater diversity as living standards improve. Thus, standards for assessing if needs are met have increased relatively, while people feel significantly greater pressures as relative resource shortages, intensified competition and the pace of modern life picks up, all of which have severely impacted their quality of life (Shen, 2006). Moreover, a focus on strengthening research on the quality of life can help relevant authorities to dynamically keep a tab on trends in urban public opinion, which would allow not only ex-ante public consultation and ex-post feedback on the implementation of urban socioeconomic development policies but also help relevant authorities better meet the diverse needs of the people based on their wishes. The main advantage of subjective quality of life indicators lies in their capture of experiences that are highly important to the individual. They primarily focus on the respondent’s assessment of their happiness and life satisfaction rather than things that policymakers or researchers believe are important. Research on subjective

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indicators can help government departments to make the right decisions and enact sound strategies to improve quality of life (Zhou & Cai, 2004). (2) The need for the quality of life in a harmonious society The Sixteenth CPC Congress Report was the first to use the formulations “the quality of life of the residents has been on the rise” and “the fundamental goal of economic development is to uplift the living standards and quality of life of the people.” It is the requirement of the present stage of China’s societal transformation, rapid economic development, and the quest to improve its human development capacity. Improvements to the quality of life emphasized in the present stage are neither fantasies divorced from reality nor overly welfare-focused inclinations. Instead, they are necessary economic development choices and important elements of developing a harmonious society (Bai, 2006). 1. Societal Transformation and the Quality of Life The concept of “societal transformation” was first proposed by Western scholars to explain the sweeping changes in the societies of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China during the last twenty years of the twentieth century. In the context of China, societal transformation refers specifically to the transition from a traditional society to modern society—the transformation from an agrarian, rural, (semi-)closed society to an industrial, urban and open modern society, which emphasizes changes in social structure (Zheng et al., 1997). Apart from this change in social structure, Li Peilin also pointed out in a paper on “the other invisible hand” that China was undergoing a transition between economic systems (Li, 1992). On the one hand, this process of “dual transition” has achieved rapid and stable economic development and significant diversity in material and cultural life, allowing the diverse needs of the people to be met. On the other hand, sharp divisions in the social structure, expanding wealth gap, and cracks in social norms have arisen during this transition process—in particular, there are severe disparities in the ability to pay for basic needs such as healthcare, education, and housing. As Sun Liping noted, imbalances between economic growth and social development have caused scores of farmers, unemployed workers and other vulnerable groups to be cast out of the social structure during the course of social development, rendering them unable to board the “express train” of economic development. The increasing severity of social problems have increasingly affected people’s sharing in the achievements of socioeconomic development and impeded their ability to lead quality lifestyles. A fundamental condition for improving the quality of life is that the broad underclasses must be free from “subsistence anxieties” and participate in social development governance on the precondition that their basic needs are met. Improving the quality of life of the people on this foundation, especially during the period of societal transformation, will allow the wishes and sentiments of the public to manifest through subjective choices and judgments. Thus, we should also give due attention to the quality of life during different periods, stay abreast of trends and underlying patterns in happiness indexes, and regard it to a certain extent as an important indicator of whether reform targets have been achieved (Xing, 2005b).

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At present, the crux of our societal transformation lies in that a group of elites controlling cultural, political, and economic capital have overly monopolized societal resources in the course of their rapid expansion and encroached upon the interests of the majority (Sun Liping). Suppose we cannot guarantee that most social groups (farmers, migrant workers, urban unemployed workers) benefit and have their basic rights protected while these elite groups are expanding rapidly. In that case, our society would face potential threats, and people will be unable to lead quality lifestyles. The concept of a harmonious society and the implementation of the Scientific Outlook on Development is positive government responses to the various social problems that have arisen during societal transformation. At present, several cities have begun to build “quality of life cities”, while some cities use “happiness indexes” as a proxy for inter-regional competitiveness, effectively integrating objective and subjective assessments of quality of life. These measures will cause more people to realize the significance of stressing harmony and stability, assistance and care for vulnerable groups, and the importance of overall sustainable social development and progress. 2. Stage of development and the quality of life The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, published in 1960, marks the preliminary formulation of Rostow’s theory of the stages of economic growth. The theory is not only about economic growth, but also an exploratory theory in early research on quality of life. Rostow divided the economic growth of countries worldwide into five stages: the traditional society, the preconditions for take-off, the take-off, the drive to maturity, and the age of high mass consumption (Rostow, 2001). In Politics and the Stages of Growth, Rostow introduced quality of life into the framework of his theory on economic growth stages, adding the sixth stage on top of the original five. Rostow argued that the sixth stage was the pursuit of quality of life—an ultimate goal for all countries. Along with the “take-off stage”, these were the two most important “mutations” in the development of human society. This was also the first time that the concept of quality of life appeared in Rostow’s theory of economic growth. He believed that the “take-off stage” and the pursuit of quality of life were the two most important “mutations” in the development of human society, and also that “a real discontinuity in the life of man in industrial society.” After comparing the US and Chinese data, Zhao Wei found that average wealth in China had already reached the level of the age of high mass consumption as described by Rostow. This stage puts a stronger emphasis on redistribution by the government to achieve individual and social goals, including an increase in leisure time. Moreover, the government must also ensure that the general public enjoys higher basic living standards and can consume the durable consumer goods and services made available by the mature economy of the twentieth century (Zhao, 2007). These are also foundations and preconditions for enhancing the quality of life. Data released by the National Bureau of Statistics show that China’s GDP was CNY 24.953 trillion in 2007, an increase of 11.9% over the previous year, moving from tenth place globally in 1978 to fourth place.

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Scholars have different opinions regarding the use of Rostow’s classification to define China’s stage of development. Even though Chinese society has not yet reached the age of high mass-consumption, based on current conditions, it is justifiable to pursue improvements in the quality of life. First, the various aspects of quality of life is not unique to the “beyond mass-consumption stage”, but extant in every stage of economic growth. Second, although the quality of life is a leading focus of economic growth in this stage and can thus bring about more rapid increases in quality of life, this does not imply that the quality of life cannot be enhanced during other stages. In contrast, quality of life can be enhanced by various degrees at every stage and may even be enhanced by an unprecedented degree. Third, while there is no reason that the quality of life cannot be part of the final stage of economic growth, it is too arbitrary and absolutist to argue in reverse that greater quality of life should only be pursued during this final stage (Zhu, 1992). At present, China has entered the stage of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. Its economy has transitioned from poverty to relative wealth, from mere expansion in quantity to rise in quality, from expanding supply to the greatest extent to a greater focus on meeting needs. As a result, it provides a strong material foundation and adequate societal conditions for improving the quality of life (Bai, 2006). 3. People-centered development and the quality of life The sociologist Amartya Sen noted that economic development could not automatically improve the quality of life of every member of society. There should be certain preconditions in assessing the quality of life: equality, poverty eradication, expansion of the rights to freedom and choice, sustainment of ecological balance, and achievement of public participation in policymaking, whereas the key to development lies in the expansion of the rights to freedom and choice (Liu, 2009). Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, is probably the most well-known scholar to use “capabilities” to assess quality of life. Sen’s capability approach is similar to the traditional Scandinavian model in objective assessments of quality of life. Its core concepts are “functioning” and “capabilities”. Sen defined functioning as a person’s set of “doings and beings,” such as their health and educational attainment. To him, capabilities were conceptually derived from functioning. Capabilities were the combination of the various functions that an individual can achieve; in other words, the force that allows functions to be exercised—through this force, the individual can realize his or her current value (Wang, 2006). In Sen’s view, quality of life should be assessed from the perspectives of capability and function. The acquisition of various utilities in life depends on individual capabilities—the higher an individual’s capability, the greater his quality of life. Hence, the key to enhancing the quality of life lies in enhancing the capability of the individual’s capability. What is noteworthy is that the key to measuring the individual quality of life does not lie in the various utilities actually obtained, given that different utilities have different values to each individual given their different values and preferences. What is important is whether the individual can acquire utility of greater value to them, or have the lifestyle they need (He & Zhou, 2002). Sen’s method of using the capability to measure levels of social welfare and quality of life has been highly

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recognized by the international academic community as well as welcomed by various governments, which have applied it as a standard and basis for measuring individual or regional quality of life. The capability approach shares similarities with the people-centered development philosophy currently advocated by the Chinese government. All-round human development includes achieving all-round development in people’s material, social, spiritual, and political lives, allowing them to reach their physical and intellectual potential fully. A development model centered upon expanding societal reproduction based on the production, allocation, exchange, consumption of material goods neglects human subjectivity. Instead, production and labor are inevitable in real life, but the production itself is not the ultimate goal. Production should serve the purpose of creating conditions that allow people to realize their self-worth and achieve allround development. Our ultimate goal is to build a peaceful, harmonious, and affluent society with a universally satisfactory quality of life. (3) Response of “harmonious society” policies to the quality of life The process of building a harmonious society is a process of improving the quality of life. To a great extent, the degree to achieve a harmonious society is reflected through the speed and stability by which quality of life is improved and the degree by which quality of life structure is upgraded (Feng, 2005). Thus, this leads to the problem of strategies for effectively improving quality of life. Conventional studies explore this problem from the “adequacy of supply” and “satisfaction of people’s needs.” To some degree, this ignores divergences in the quality-of-life demands of different social groups. In particular, it does not allow for a sound combined analysis of objective and subjective indicators. This book approaches the topic from an ideal conception of quality of life to overcome these shortcomings. In reality, people assess their quality of life through a combination of subjective opinion (high or low) and objective assessment (high or low). Life is without exception contained within these four assessments. Objective living conditions refer to ascertainable living environments, such as material conditions, working conditions, health, and social relations. Subjective opinions include assessments of overall or specific living conditions, including cognitive or affective assessments. If both objective and subjective indicators are described using the terms “good” or “bad,” we derive a contingency table that represents four typical levels of quality of life (as illustrated in Table 1.1). Higher subjective and objective assessments indicate a high quality of life, the ultimate common pursuit of humanity. If both are low, this indicates that the individual Table 1.1 Typical Quality of Life Levels

Objective well-being Positive Negative Source Zapf (1984)

Subjectively perceived quality of life Positive

Negative

Well-being (4) Adaptation (2)

Dissonance (3) Deprivation (1)

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remains in abject poverty and requires social assistance regarding both their demands and their capabilities. High subjective quality of life but a low objective quality of life points to two possibilities: (1) It may be that the individual is still in a “state of aspiration” and should deploy their creative abilities to enhance their objective quality of life. At the same time, the government should improve social, economic, political, and cultural institutions to match their high level of subjective well-being. (2) It may be that the individual lacks awareness of prudential value and is in a state of “self-satisfaction,” which indicates societal regression and inability—a form of “selfresigned” satisfaction. In the second instance, there should be greater investment in education and training to stimulate individual agency adequately. If the objective assessment of quality of life is high but subjective assessment is low, this indicates that the individual may be “tempted” by material trappings and has gradually lost their autonomy and creativity. Alternatively, they may have a strong sense of relative deprivation and play the role of potential social rebels and reform advocators. In the course of rapidly developing modern life, we should perhaps seek a high-quality value order to reinvigorate the vitality of life based on our local culture. Regarding situation (1) in Table 1.1, the “compensatory justice” principle should be applied. The basic tenet of this principle is to provide groups that require care and assistance with the services and compensations that they need. With the advent of China’s Harmonious Society goals, Rawls’ seminal work, A Theory of Justice, stresses that the principles of freedom, equality, and equal opportunity are the basic framework of society. The basic institutions of a society and the structure formed from its arrangements should be in line with the principles of justice. In Rawls’ view, these principles first require that people accord liberty in broadly equal terms. Once a freedom of this type is established, the “compensatory justice” principle that he espoused should be applied to the fundamental structure of society. The difference principle requires that inequality in basic social goods—power, opportunity, income, wealth, et cetera—can only be legitimate when conducive to raising the corresponding status of the least advantaged members of society (Rawls, 2001). For those members of society who have a very low quality of life, both in objective and subjective terms, our society, or collective, has the responsibility and obligation to care for and provide those persons at the lowest rung of society. Moreover, an excessive disparity in the distribution of social benefits would prejudice social stability and positive social functioning, ultimately preventing the interests of this relatively disadvantaged community from the progress it deserves. The difference principle can be better characterized as reflecting a form of humanitarian care—care for those on the lowest rung—rather than a philosophy of equality. The quality of our society can be judged if we take as our reference point those members of society with a lower subjective quality of life and the extent to which their living conditions and subjective well-being have improved. In the real world, a social underclass exists no matter how quickly society develops or how good welfare measures are. Thus, to the greatest possible extent, our society improve and enhance their living conditions and life satisfaction in absolute rather than relative terms, so long as they are able to share relatively well in the fruits of social development. As a result, we may feel

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that we lead quality lives even in a grossly unequal society with continued economic development. Regarding to situation (2) in Table 1.1, we should apply the “prudential awareness method.” Assessments of quality of life are based on material conditions of life, related to subjective assessments, and attuned to the state of social development and value systems. On the whole, divergences in objective qualities of life between urban/rural residents and persons of different age groups, educational attainment levels, and occupations may exist even as the subjective quality of life is improving. It is related to these social groups’ life goals, reference groups, and actual life circumstances. A general assessment of quality of life is related to the various aspects of an individual’s life. However, different persons have vastly different conceptions of what constitutes quality of life at the individual level. In real life, each individual has different views on whether their quality of life is satisfactory or not and their level of satisfaction. These different views are related to their expected quality of life. Thus, these views are a complex, multi-layered psychological state formed from the interaction between psychological factors such as needs (including motivations, desires, interests), awareness, and emotions with external inducements. Hence, there would be cases where the individual is still in “a state of aspiration” or “an adaptive state.” Economic wealth directly determines the objective level of quality of life and impacts the subjective quality of life to a certain degree. Apart from being influenced by economic conditions to a certain extent, factors underlying subjective quality of life are also affected by cognitive abilities, influenced by factors such as social status, social experience, educational background, and age. In the present society, cognitive abilities are mainly reflected by educational attainment because education allows people to gain an overall understanding of society and constantly adjust their expectations. From the perspective of prudential values, changes in cognitive abilities are not only reflected by education, but also a series of indicator systems. Qizilbash makes a list of prudential values as follows: (1) minimum levels of nutrition, health, sanitation, shelter, rest, and security; (2) certain basic intellectual and physical capacities and literacy; (3) certain levels of self-respect and aspiration; (4) enjoyment; (5) autonomy or self-determination (“positive freedom”); (6) liberty (“negative freedom”); (7) understanding; (8) significant relations with others and some participation in social life; and (9) accomplishment (Qizilbash, 1998). Based on this conception, only when these indicators are realized can a high-quality life that we experience be said to have passed through prudential deliberation and justified. Of course, this standard is only an ideal standard for scholarly exploration. Considering China’s actual conditions, deficiencies in recognition can be effectively addressed only through enhancing basic education levels, understanding, and social participation for all of its people. Concerning the situation (3) in Table 1.1, we need to apply the “humanist acculturation method.” Objectively high but subjectively low quality of life indicates that the individual may be experiencing material temptations. Therefore, it would require changes to their mental state, such as through corrections to their outlooks on life

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and value systems through the edification of philosophy and literature to develop a positive attitude towards the world and thus obtain spiritual happiness. Given China’s continued and rapid economic growth, people are often susceptible to negative emotions such as anxiety and tension, leading to lower subjective quality of life. Given these circumstances, it is especially important to maintain stability in the subjective quality of life. How can this stability be improved? A stronger focus on subjective quality of life, in aspects such as social civility, fairness, and the environment, is required when the economic cycle is at a sluggish stage. Furthermore, it requires stronger social governance to improve subjective quality of life and thus ensure its stability (Zhou, 2007). Even though a higher objective quality of life is beneficial to improving the individual’s ethical outlook and moral values of the and broader society, greater economic prosperity can also damage moral values and civility, a common phenomenon in modern civilization and industrial society. Thus, focus on, and improvements to moral values are profoundly significant to our times. We must put spiritual culture and moral values through high-level prudential deliberation, define their value as symbols and then integrate fine cultural products into people’s lives through our educational and cultural systems. History tells us that, a life rich in humanistic substance and spiritual pursuits can still be fulfilling, meaningful, positive, and happy even under arduous living conditions. It also fully shows that if humanistic ideals and moral values are internalized as behavioral norms, people can achieve happiness by obtaining sacred and legitimate principles of action and discovering the true value of life.

1.2 Discussion on Categories Related to the Research on Quality of Life Scholars hold different views on quality of life since it is an elusive concept. Nevertheless, studying the quality of life, the top priority is to clarify the concept’s connotation. For this purpose, the author will focus on analyzing and comparing the related concepts in this chapter to provide references and enlightenment, according to relevant research results from China and other countries. (1) Living standards and objective quality of life Quality of life is a generalization and summary of the various characteristics of all activities which social members carry out to meet their needs for survival and development. It is a comprehensive concept that reflects the development of human life; and a sign of social development, including human development progress (Chen, 1993). Domestic scholars generally agree on such a definition; that is, quality of life refers to “the extent to which the society provides the national life and the extent to which the national life needs are satisfied.” It mainly includes three aspects: first, the state and characteristics of people’s material and spiritual life, mainly the characteristics, level and satisfaction of modern people’s family life, professional life, social life, and leisure life; second, the realization of people’s value and happiness,

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which mainly refers to the two-way perception between modern individuals and social groups, self-concept in interpersonal relations, opportunities for human development, the need and satisfaction of self-perfection and self-esteem; third, people’s living conditions and environmental quality, as well as modern people’s difficulties in life and the difficulty of overcoming them caused by the material shortage and environmental deterioration (Ye, 1991). When we talk about the quality of life, many people may naturally believe that improving living standards keeps abreast with the improvement of quality of life. In fact, this view is incorrect, for living standards and quality of life are two different concepts. Although there is an inseparable connection between them, the connotation and measurement standards are not the same. People may live under the same living standard but possess different levels of satisfaction, which can be explained by the differences in their subjective feelings at the same life level or development level. This type belongs to homogeneity with the different amounts. There are differences in their material life development level for people who lead lives with the same life satisfaction. It indicates that they are identical in terms of life needs and satisfaction, but there stand qualitative differences in the level of social life development, namely, this type belongs to heterogeneity with the same amount (Zhan & Chen, 1997). Therefore, living standard only constitute one aspect of the quality of life, which includes not only objective indicators such as people’s living standards, but also subjective evaluating contents of people’s objective conditions of material and spiritual life provided by the society. The living standard mainly reflects growth at the quantitative level, while the quality of life mainly reflects growth at the qualitative level, which regards people’s all-round development as the ultimate goal and the essence of the Scientific Outlook on Development. (2) Satisfaction, subjective well-being and subjective quality of life Subjective quality of life, also known as the perceived quality of life, is the quality of life felt or undertaken by people in their actual life, reflecting the extent to which people’s needs are satisfied. Subjective quality of life indicators originated in the United States in the early twentieth century and gradually matured. To a certain extent, the western academic field represented by the United States mainly focused on the subjective aspects of quality of life, and took individual happiness as the research focus or starting point. American sociologist Campbell defined the quality of life as “the overall feeling of happiness in life.” American Chinese scholar Lin Nan believed that quality of life is “the evaluation and summary of all aspects of life.” In researching the subjective quality of life, the society that satisfies individual needs to the greatest extent is generally regarded as the goal that people pursue. This “peopleoriented” approach makes researchers take life satisfaction as the basic concept of research. Satisfaction encompasses judgment or cognitive experience, which is the perception of the difference between the original expectation and the final attainment (Zhou & Cai, 2004). In the quality of life research tradition, some choose to measure life satisfaction, while others measure happiness. The only difference between the two is that the former discusses people’s attitude from the cognitive aspect, asking about people’s

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satisfaction with leisure and entertainment, social participation, living environment, medical care, family relationship, working environment, economic income, and other items. The latter investigates the “affective” aspect of people’s attitudes, asking how they feel about energy-filled states such as energy level, pain level, and emotional state. Generally speaking, people believe that life satisfaction reflects people’s stable and long-term attitude, while happiness mostly reveals people’s temporary or transient emotions (Campbell, 1981). These two different levels reflect a cognitive attitude and evaluation of the individual towards himself. Such cognitive attitude and evaluation often incorporate the individual’s judgment of his or her situation and the overall social conditions to the aspects concerned.

1.3 The Basic Structure and Research Content of This Book This book comprises nine chapters, including theoretical evolution, structural elements, changes of subjective quality of life, and objective quality of life development. The research topics can be divided into three sections. From this chapter to Chap. 3, the first section, mainly includes the research on quality of life and theoretical evolution, providing theoretical guidance for the empirical analysis of this book and illustrating the scientific implications in the research of quality of life in social change. The second section, from Chaps. 4 to 7, focuses on the influencing factors of quality of life of Chinese residents, structural components, and the relationship between the related factors to conduct empirical research, so as to further understand the present status of quality of life in the Chinese culture, thus providing a basic framework for further research on quality of life. Finally, the third section, from Chaps. 8 and 9, focuses on the empirical analysis of the changes of subjective and objective quality of life of Chinese residents, which is the focal point of the book, and further explains the driving force and constraints behind the changes through the research of the changes. Lin and Lu (1987) believed that the quality of life should include at least three parts: feelings of physical and mental health, individual life satisfaction and, individual feedback to the society. Therefore, we studied not only the changing trends in quality of life, but also health status and satisfaction. The specific research contents of each chapter are described below. This chapter focuses on the significance of quality of life from the perspective of social change. The analysis holds that improving the quality of life of all the people is the real social need in our current social transformation period, rapid economic development period, and the practice of the “people-oriented” Scientific Outlook. Although traditional research mainly discusses how to effectively improve the quality of life from the “adequacy of social supply” and “the satisfaction of people’s demand,” two aspects, to some extent, neglected the differences between the demand for quality of life of different groups, especially the inability to analyze the objective indicators and subjective indicators jointly. In order to overcome this disadvantage, we discuss and analyze the quality of life in an ideal way. The corresponding policy scheme is: because of the ideal type of “the deprived,” we should compensate under

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the “difference principle”; for the ideal type of “compliance,” we should enhance in a “reflective cognitive style”; “enculturation” should be adopted to improve the “incongruity” in the ideal type. Chapter 2 divides and studies the development stages of research on the quality of life in China and the West. The analysis reveals that the research on the modern western quality of life research has experienced three stages of development: from the objective indicators primarily to prioritize measuring with subjective indicators and taking both subjective and objective quality of life indicators into consideration; from primarily descriptive analysis of indicators to empirical analysis under theoretical guidance; from the research focused on the United States to all countries around the world. Then the second chapter analyzed, in particular, the research progress of quality of life in China in recent years and the debate on methodology. Finally, it is pointed out that the future development orientation on the research of quality of life in China should be an organic combination of the above research methods. Chapter 3 discusses three approaches to the theory of quality of life in chronological order: the utilitarian approach, the prudential value approach and the capability development approach. The analysis holds that the utilitarian approach is based on people’s actual desires, starts from “serving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people,” and measures the actual utility obtained. This approach emphasizes more people’s actual desires. The prudential value approach to the quality of life is based on the informed desires to explore which indicators and contents can make people experience a better life. For this purpose, the study focuses on the relevant research of Griffin and Qizilbash. Then, Sen and Nussbaum’s capability development approach is discussed, emphasizing that the list of capability should be built upon basic conditions, pursuing valuable “being” and “doing” to enrich human life. “To enrich” here includes pleasure and enjoyment, and it is for this reason that the utilitarian approach and the prudential value approach bears many resemblances. Chapter 4 finds that subjective well-being in the traditional quality of life research consists of happiness treated as affective measures in orientation and satisfaction treated as cognitive measures in orientation. However, a recent study found substantive problems in the traditional classification scheme. Therefore, this chapter uses the urban resident databases of CGSS 2003 and CGSS 2005, and people’s subjective well-being is divided into sections of happiness as affective in orientation and satisfaction as cognitive in orientation according to international research conventions. Combined with the database, this division is applicable and scientific in China, disproving the hypothesis that satisfaction as a measure of cognition and happiness as a measure of affection are an illusion. The study also found that the subjective well-being of Chinese urban residents is steadily improving. The research further confirms that satisfaction reflects a relatively stable and long-term attitude and intention, while happiness only reflects an individual’s temporary or transient emotions could also stand in China. Chapter 5 analyzes the influencing factors of the subjective well-being of Chinese urban residents based on empirical data. This chapter analyzes and discusses the influencing factors of subjective well-being by using the data of CGSS. It is found that females, people with higher income, married people, employed people, people

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with advanced consumption attitudes, people with less sense of relative deprivation, and Party members of CPC generally perceive higher subjective well-being. Among them, “relative deprivation” has the most explanatory power. It indicates that to some extent, the most direct threat to the subjective well-being of Chinese urban residents is living in a rapidly changing and competitive society with prominent social inequality. Chapter 6 holds that there is no clear research presupposition within previous studies on the differences in subjective well-being between urban and rural residents, resulting in the arbitrary choice of research variables. The interpretation of the research conclusions is not very solid. Therefore, this book analyzes and studies the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents under two frameworks, one from the perspective of utilitarianism and the other from the prudential value. From the perspective of utilitarianism, the analysis is carried out in terms of the “level of happiness,” the study found that the self-reported score of subjective well-being for urban residents is higher than that of rural residents. From the perspective of prudential value, the self-reported subjective well-being of urban residents is still higher than that of rural residents. Social and economic variables, such as job satisfaction, horizontal comparison variable, and vertical comparison variable, have significant statistical significance on the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents, respectively. In Chap. 7, CGSS 2006 data are used to research the impact of leisure style on the quality of life of urban and rural residents. Four factors are selected for leisure style, and two factors for the content related to overall life satisfaction: “material life satisfaction” and “social interaction satisfaction.” The study found that the impact of socio-demographic variables on quality of life is basically similar to what previous studies have found. The mechanisms of leisure activities on quality of life varies with different levels of life satisfaction. The more leisure activities are used as a means to improve social status or as a mechanism to enjoy life, the higher their material life satisfaction will be. Social interaction satisfaction is obtained through the perceptual understanding and judgment of the meaning of life and cultural identity. As people move up the social ladder, their social satisfaction can be significantly improved by changing their leisure activity routines such as doing chores and watching TV. Chapter 8 uses a hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort cross-classified random-effects model based on Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) data from 2003 to 2013 to conduct a more in-depth temporal analysis of Chinese residents’ happiness. It is found that there is a U-shaped association between age and happiness, and the difference in happiness among people with different gender, household registration, and political status increases with age. While the difference in happiness among people with different marital statuses and educational levels decreases with age, and work is a more important factor for urban residents than rural residents. Factors such as period and cohort have a strong impact on happiness. Different happiness effects are exhibited for dissimilar household registrations in different life courses, and this effect shows crossover changes with the progress of time. The underlying reason is the influence of potential social changes brought by complicated historical events. The analysis of the changing status of groups with different happiness in the time dimension can help improve residents’ subjective well-being in a more targeted way.

References

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Chapter 9 presents some reflections on the research on quality of life and some thoughts about the future research. This research reflects how to rationally view the relationship between social change and quality of life, the relationship between quality of life and quantity of life, and the relationship between economic development and subjective evaluation. It argues that quality of life should be viewed from an objective, scientific and rational perspective. At the same time, the research also analyzes some fundamental questions that should be tackled in future research. Such questions are how to define the meaning of quality of life and their working definition; how to measure the influencing factors of quality of life; how to choose methods to calculate the factors of quality of life; how to define the quality of life according to the specific social culture, population group, and topics and issues; how to give the appropriate weight for different indicators of quality of life. What are the “core indicators” of quality of life? That is the representation of good human life. It is not only a meta-problem in the research on quality of life, but also a theoretical issue that the academic field debate. If we choose to be inclusive, we need to address the challenge of normalizing the measurement of quality of life, and if we choose to be compassionate, we need to consider the specific measurement of geographical and cultural differentiation.

References Campbell, A. (1981). The sense of well-being in America: Recent and trends. New York: McGrawHill. Chen, Y. P. (1993). Comparative analysis of two quality of life evaluation methods. Social Sciences in Guangdong, (3). He, C. L., & Zhou, C. C. (2002). The concept of welfare and quality of life indicators: A study on the conceptual framework and structure of the European quality of life indicator system. Social Sciences Abroad, (1). Improving the Quality of Life to Build a Harmonious Society. (2006, October 16). [Economic Information Daily]. Bai, J. F. Improve Quality of Life Realize Social Harmony. (2005, September 20). [China Education Daily]. Feng, L. T. Li, P. L. (1992). “The Other Invisible Hand”: Transformation of social structures. Social Sciences in China, (5). Lin, N., & Lu, H. L. (1987). Structure and indicators of quality of life: Analysis of data from the 1985 Tianjin one thousand household survey. Sociological Studies, (6). Liu, R. Z. (2009). High level of economic development/=high quality of urban life. Hunan Financial Economic Journal. Qin, B. X., & Zhu, C. Y. (1988). The Rise of Quality of Life Research in America, (3). Qizilbash, M. (1998). The concept of well—being. Economics and Philosophy, 14(1), 51–73. Rostow. (2001). The stages of economic growth: A non-communist manifesto. China Social Sciences Press. Rawls. (2001). A Theory of Justice (He, H. H., He, B. G. & Liao, S. B. Trans.). China Social Sciences Press. Shen, J. (2006). From “Adoration of GDP” to the care for well-being index—profound turns in the views of development in perspective of theory of development. The Journal of Jiangsu Administration Institute, (3).

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Wang, Y. P. (2006). Amartya Sen’s approach of capabilities: Applications in development economics. Economic Theory and Business Management, (4). Ye, N. K. (1991). Current situation and evaluation of quality of life for contemporary urban residents. Chinese Journal of Sociology, (7). Zapf, W. (1984). “Individuelle Wohlfahrt: Lebensbedingungen und wahrgenommene Lebensqualität.” pp. 24 in Lebens-qualität in der Bundesrepublik. Objektive Lebensbedingungen und Subjektives Wohlempfinden, edited by W. Glatzer and W. Zapf. Campus, Frankfurt/Main. Zhao, W. (2007). The current stage of China’s Socio-economic development: Judgment from Three Perspectives. Social Science Front, (5). Zhan, T. Y., & Chen, Y. P. (1997). Evaluation of quality of life: Indicators and methods. Sun Yatsen University Forum, (6). Zheng, H. S., Li, Q., & Li, L. L. (1997). Social structure and social relations of contemporary China. Capital Normal University Press. Zhou, C. C., & Cai, J. C. (2004). Quality of life indicators: From subjective perspective. Wuhan University Journal (Philosophy & Social Sciences), (5). Zhou, X. X. (2007). Economic analysis of quality of life. Journal of the Party School of CPC Hangzhou Municipal Committee, (3). Zhu, G. H. (1992). Quality of life and socio-economic development. Population & Economics, (5).

Chapter 2

Literature Review of Research on Quality of Life in China and Western Countries

If the main feature of the first 20 years of reform and opening up is to improve people’s material living standards, then the current task of our society is to improve people’s quality of life. This is not only reflected in physical life aspects such as economy, education, health, nutrition, but also in virtual ones like spiritual life and mental health. This chapter first reviews the status quo of research on quality of life in China and western countries, and then distinguishes and compares the methodological orientation of exponential synthesis method and factor decomposition method in research on quality of life.

2.1 Literature Review of Research on Quality of Life in Western Countries The research of social indicators and quality of life, originating in western academia, provides theoretical guidance and social diagnosis for policy decision-making and social development in specific historical periods and effectively contributed to the social construction of that time. The development of the research in the West can be generally classified into the following stage (Song, 2006): ➀ The founding stage in the 1920s–1930s. Hoover Research Center, with the American scholar William Ogburn as its leader, published in 1933 the report Recent Social Trends in the United States, which analyzed the conditions and development trends of multiple facets of the American social life. ➁ The burgeoning stage in the 1950s–1960s. The concept of quality of life was first explicitly proposed by economist Galbraith in The Affluent Society in 1958. Later, Gurin, Field, Hadley and other scholars studied the spiritual life and subjective well-being of the American people from different perspectives. ➂ Systematic research stage in the 1970s. In his book Politics and the Stages of Growth, economist Rostow put forward the highest stage of social development—“the pursuit of quality life” stage and formed a complete theoretical system. Since the 1970s, the research on quality of life flourished and, together with the social indicators, became © Social Sciences Academic Press 2023 P. Wang, Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2221-5_2

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an important research field of social change in social psychology (cited from Lin & Lu, 1987). ➃ Gradual divergence in the 1980s. Since then, scholars have carried out diversified researches and discussion on the basic concepts, measurement indicators and influencing factors of quality of life. So far, as the research goes further, the divergence becomes clearer and the debates more intense. An inclusive academic field has thus been created. (1) The retrospection and theme of western quality of life research Looking back at the western quality of life research, what can be found is that it has been developed from being a social indicator of relative welfare at the overall group level (a measure of national conditions) to a measurement indicator of subjective feelings at the individual level. The change in this process is strikingly similar to the current turn of research on quality of life in China, reflecting a shift in the evaluation criteria of the outlook on development from focusing mainly on economic growth to people-oriented and well-rounded development. After all, improving the quality of life is the ultimate goal of social development. In order to achieve this goal, we not only need to maintain stable and sustained economic growth as the cornerstone of development, but also strive to improve various social environments and the comprehensive level of social development. Although it is generally accepted that the concept of quality of life put forward by Galbraith in 1958 marks the inception of modern quality of life research. The research of it can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Chicago School represented by the sociologist Ogburn made extraordinary contributions to the measurement of social change. In his Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature published in 1922, Ogburn introduced the core concept of “cultural lag”. He believed that the progress and development of science and technology were faster than those of culture, which led to the occurrence of social problems. It is when Ogburn noticed the imbalanced development between science and technology and values did he begin to pay attention to the contradiction between objective conditions and quality of life. Ogburn wanted to create a statistical database to analyze trends of social development and believed that social changes could be explained by rigorous scientific measurements. In 1929, President Hoover appointed Ogburn as the organizer of a research committee on social trends, the aim of which is to conduct annual assessments of social trends in the United States. Thanks to the efforts of Ogburn and his research team, five consecutive annual reports have been published during 1929 and 1933, of which the most influential was the Recent Social Trends in the United States. With more than 1,500 pages, this research report encompasses more than 30 fields including education, race, recreation, leisure, health, environment, women, occupation, family, crime, etc. across the United States. In terms of its content, it began to focus on the indicators of quality of life, which laid the foundation for future sociological research in this respect. However, the research result is only a superficial numerical presentation and description with no corresponding theoretical framework and explanation, so it was criticized and questioned by scholars.

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After World War II, the United States witnessed a boom in its economy. Especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the economy developed rapidly. At the same time, the relentless pursuit of economic development also led to a series of social problems, such as the gap between the rich and poor, environmental pollution, moral degradation, imbalanced social mechanisms. In fact, the rapid development of economy is often accompanied by the relative lag of social mechanisms and the unfair distribution of resources; the process of industrialization is often accompanied by the pollution of natural environment and the destruction of ecological balance; urbanization is often accompanied by the weakening of social relations and the increasing of mental burden, and the specialization of production technology is often accompanied by a series of potential social problems such as the loss of individual value. The utility that economic development brings to people has exhibited the characteristic of diminishing marginal utility. At this time people desired a brand-new, multidimensional and comprehensive development goal. It was against this backdrop that quality of life is seen as a comprehensive development goal that focused on the ecological environment and dealt with the limits to growth in an affluent, post-industrial society (Noll, 2004). The emergence of a large number of economic and social problems made people skeptical of the reliability of measuring the quality of life by GNP or GDP, and they began to advocate the measurement of quality of life by diversified indicators (Veenhoven, 1996), which was reflected in the “Social Indicators Movement” launched in the 1960s. In 1957, Gurin, Veroff and Felcd of the University of Michigan and several other universities jointly conducted a national random sampling survey to study the mental health and well-being of the Americans (quoted from Zhou, 2008:17–18). In 1965, Cantril conducted a study on well-being, asking respondents from 13 countries about their hopes, fears and concerns, and asked them to identify their “best” and “worst” life experiences. In order to obtain accurate and authentic answers, respondents are asked to fill in open-ended questionnaires, and one of the fruits was that 18 fields most representative of American concerns were obtained in this way (Cantril, 1965; Kerce, 1992). Meanwhile, Norman Bradburn (1969) also carried out an investigation on the happiness of the American population. He defined the particular conception of psychological well-being as a degree where “an individual will be high in psychological well-being in the degree to which he has an excess of positive over negative affect.” Both of the dimensions are measures of the positive and negative affects experienced by individuals in their past two weeks. Land (2000) believed that “the quality of life” had its roots the Social Indicators Movement in the 1960s. A NASA and AAAS project designed to predict the social impact of space races contributed to the development of the Social Indicators Movement (Land, 1983; Noll & Zapf, 1994), Raymond Bauer, who was in charge of the project, explored the terms and concepts about “social indicators” in Social Indicators. His definition was that social indicators are “statistics, statistical series, and all other forms of evidence—that enable us to assess where we stand and are going with respect to our values and goals.” Here Bauer explicitly illustrated the relationship between social indicators and quality of life research, that is, social indicators are scientific methods of quality of life research. Due to the lack of sufficient data

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and valid analysis methods, this research report did not achieve what the researcher expected to do. In addition, the United Nations also believed that social indicators could be viewed as statistical values that reflect important social environments and be used to assess those environments and the process of their evolution (United Nations, 1994). This is the same as Bauer’s definition of social indicators, both of which emphasized assessment of various aspects in society and the consideration of changes in these aspects during social changes. Since the publication of Social Indicators in 1966, there emerged a number of articles and books on the study of quality of life by the approach of social indicators. In 1969, Toward a Social Report from the USDHEW argues that health and disease, income and poverty, the natural environment, public order and safety, social mobility, knowledge, science, and the arts, participation and alienation can all considered as important social indicators (USDHEW, 1969; Rapley, 2003). Social indicators are “a statistic of direct normative interest which facilitates concise, comprehensive and balanced judgments about the condition of major aspects of a society.” (USDHEW, 1969:97). Land (2000) believed that economist Olson defined the concept of social indicators in this report and regarded these indicators as a direct measurement of welfare status. He also concluded that if social indicators can change in a good way, it indicates that the society is progressing, or people can “live a more prosperous life”. In the early 1970s, the study of social indicators made great progress, and related works and research results spread rapidly around the world. In 1971, Rostow put forward that the stage of “pursuing the quality of life” was the ultimate stage and the inevitable trend of the development of human society in Politics and the Stages of Growth. For the first time, the quality of life was incorporated into the theoretical framework of social indicators, which bred the Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) and Index of Social Progress (ISP) with far-reaching significance. Land described the enthusiasm of American intellectuals for the study of social indicators. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) was established in Washington, D.C. in 1972 to coordinate research on social indicators. A series of academic works was published, which played an important role in defining and developing methodologies for the measurement of indicators of well-being (Andrews & Withey, 1976; Campbell et al., 1976); the federal government began to adopt a set of comprehensive social indicators… Some continuous data collected on the basis of periodic national population sampling surveys began to be widely used… In 1974, the first volume of the international journal Social Indicators Research was published. (Land, 2000). The definition and research of social indicators above were carried out in the United States, but soon they were spread in Europe and adopted by many international organizations. Social Reporting is the most important and successful application of social indicators and quality of life research (Noll, 2004). So far, there are few regular reports published at the national level among European countries (see Table 2.1). The “Europe Index Survey” carried out in the early 1970s in the European Union collected data and carried out longitudinal comparison within the European Community, and conducted annually three to five sampling surveys of quality of life.

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Table 2.1 National social reports of the European countries Country/Institution

Title

First published in

The Latest issue published in

Period

Austria

Sozialstatistische Daten

1977

1990

4–5 years

Czech Republic

Ten Years of Rebuilding Captitalism

1999

1999

?

Institute of Sociology

Czech Society after 1989 Levelikär I Danmark

1976

1997

- 4 years

Datenreport

1983

2002

2 years

France

Données Sociales

1973

1999

3 years

Institut Nationale de la Statistique et des Economique Great Britain Central Statistical Office

Social Trends

1970

2001

1 year

Hungary

Social Report

1990

2000

2 years

English

English

1992

1998

Sintesi della Vits Sociale Italiana

1990

1990

La situatione del paese

1992

2000

1 year

1973

2001

1 year

1997

?

2000

2 years

Statistisches Zentralamt

J. Vecemik/Mateju (eds.) Denmark Danmarks Statistics Socialforskningsinstituttet Germany Statistisches Bundesant with WZB and ZLMA

Tarki Italy Institute Nationale di Statistica

GENSIS

Rapporto sulla situazione sociale del paese

Luxembourg

Recueil D’Etudes Sociales

GEPS/lnstead Netherland

Social and Cultural Report

1974

(continued)

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Table 2.1 (continued) Country/Institution

Title

First published in

Social and Cultural Planning Office

The Latest issue published in

Period

English 1998

Norway

Sosialt Utsyn

Statistics Norway

English Edition

1974

2000

2 years

Norges Offentlige Ltredniger

leveka i Norge

1993

1993

?

Portugal

Portugal Social 1985–1990

1992

1992

?

1996

?

2000

Instituto Nacional de Estatistica Instituto de Cienicias Sociais,

Situacao Social em Portugal, 1960/ 1992

Lniversidade Lisboa Spain

Indicadores Sociales

1991

1999

?

Instituto National de Estadistica

Panoramica Social

1974

1994

?

Sweden

Perspectiv pä Välfärden

1987

irregular

Statistics Sweden

Välfärd och Ojämlikhet

1997

?

Switzerland

Sozialbericht 2000

2000

?

2000

Ch. Suter (ed.) Data source: Noll (2004)

Germany established the indicator system of social and political decision-making in the 1970s, and issued its first report on quality of life and social development in 1977 (Bao, 2013). There were also the biennial Social and Cultural Report of the Netherlands, the annual Social Trends report of the United Kingdom and the Social Data (Données Sociales) of France, all of whose publishers have lasted for more than thirty years (Habich & Noll, 1994). In addition, comprehensive social reports for countries such as Portugal, Switzerland and the Czech Republic have just been published recently (Noll, 2004). Although there was a break in the research on social indicators in the United States in the 1980s, high-level research continued (Rapley, 2003). In addition to the publicly-recognized measurement methods with high validity from OECD and the Human Development Index from the United Nations, international organizations such as the World Bank have published studies on indicators of national and social welfare (United Nations, 1995). These first illustrate research progress in social indicators, which is not only response to the growing demand for information but

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also what is needed for activating social policy and addressing the challenges of conceptualizing and quantifying quality of life (Noll, 2000; Rapley, 2003). In the 1980s, research of social indicators stagnated, mainly for two reasons: first, social indicators played a great role in the establishment of national statistical data, but once they became mature, people’s interest would be diminished; second, in the face of various social problems at that time, social indicators could not provide satisfactory answers (Lin and Lu, 1987). It was at this stage, however, that the “conservative ideology” of the market began to emphasize individual responsibility, and people began to have a strong interest in the idea of quality of life as a concept at the individual level (Rapley, 2003). Because people realized that the ultimate goal is the great improvement of physical and cultural living standards, it is the common nature of all to create a satisfactory living environment for every member of society (Qin & Zhu, 1988). Just as the traditional Chinese saying goes “The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide.” Such is true of quality-of-life research. Evaluating quality of life emphasizes on the subjective measurement of specific culture and value system that the individuals are rooted in, which not only reflects the transcendence of the stage of social development and the transformation of the content of the social indicators’ system, but also upholds the primacy of human beings and individual values, beliefs, needs and interests to a certain extent. It is also a comprehensive, rich, and concentrated representation of the perspectives and domains of academic research. Since the 1990s, research on this field has highlighted more the internal mechanism and influencing factors of improving quality of life, taking quality of life as an indicator to observe people’s physical and mental health. The introduction of research methods such as structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear model has made the empirical analysis of quality of life move to a further level, especially in the research domains on the influencing factors of quality of life, the quality of life for some of the special groups. Thanks to the increase of multidisciplinary research on quality of life, the analysis of social issues through the combination of quality of life and other essential elements such as inequality, welfare, freedom and capacity also promoted the in-depth study of environmental factors that restricts quality of life from a broader social structure and social system. From the aspects of individual freedom, social participation and collective action, how to improve the quality of life in public space is considered. During this period, both the prudential value analysis framework of quality of life and the famous capacity approach to quality-of-life research were brought to life. Moreover, in terms of the indicators of quality of life, there have been some well-known systems such as “Human Development Index”, “World Health Organization Quality-of-Life Scale”, and “The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare”. Research on quality of life has become an all-encompassing and ubiquitous idea at its present stage. Although it has been used in areas such as the media, magazines, and social networking sites in a very broad sense, for academic research, scholars are becoming more and more concerned with what is the nature of human life and what constitutes the core elements of people’s lives by thinking under particular theoretical frameworks, so as to delineate the measurement of quality of life. Based on this

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type of thinking pattern, on the one hand, some overall indicators are being developed, such as the “Real Development Index” proposed by Canadian scholar Mark in 2011, which is widely used in the United States, Canada, Tahiti and other countries and regions. In addition, there is the Gross National Happiness (GNH), proposed by the Commission on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress in 2009, to replace the measurement by GDP and Indicators of Sustainable Development established by the World Bank in the World Development Indicators. As Land (2000, quoted from Rapley, 2003) pointed out, the concept of “quality of life”, which emerged in the 1990s, not only provided “a social and economic policy objective”, but can also be applied into many areas of life, including both individual material and non-material welfare and collective values such as freedom, justice and the guarantee of the sustainability of natural living conditions. On the other hand, considering cultural and geographical diversity, regional and community-specific social welfare indicators can also be actively developed, such as the national citizenship project and the “Quality of Life in Newcastle” in Australia, and the “Sustainable Seattle” project in the United States. Through the review of the western research process of quality of life above, it can be found that the research on quality of life has experienced three development stages: first, it originated from the research on social indicators. In its early stage, the focus was on the analysis and evaluation of objective indicators. The research scope is wide and comprehensive, but many of them still were focused on economic indicators to provide reference and guidance for policy analysis, reflecting the prevailing pragmatism in the United States. Second, with the development of the society, people are pursuing diversified life standards. The measurement of life satisfaction has become a history. Drawing upon the rapid development of statistical methods, more and more outstanding empirical research results with theoretical guidance have appeared. The corresponding international journals have been published one after another, and international research is increasing day by day, as reflected by the periodical publications of development reports. Thirdly, the research on quality of life is increasingly diversified, including both international and regional research. The rise of health-related quality of life research, the research on quality of life of special groups, its perspective of psychology and culture has promoted the integrated development of quality-of-life research and application, and also has cultivated a number of famous experts such as Diener, Veenhoven, and Land.

2.2 Literature Review of Research on Quality of Life in China It was not until the middle and late 1980s that research on quality of life gradually attracted the attention of Chinese scholars. In the 30 years of research on quality of life, based on China’s national conditions, scholars have achieved fruitful results and gradually become mature. However, it is necessary to comprehensively summarize

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and discuss the achievements and existing problems, so as to provide reference for future academic research and future direction. (1) The development and main issues of the research on quality of life in China As early as 1999, some scholars have estimated that there once had been at least 50 groups of research on quality of life or organizations engaged in the field. These groups either focused on taking the part of the population in a certain area as the research object, taking a particular aspect of life as the content, or discussing the methods with which the indicators framework to evaluate the quality of life in general can be built. The subject areas involved include economy, society, population, environment and planning (Chen, 1999). If a search is conducted on the academic trend of residents’ quality of life, it can be found that the research on quality of life exhibited a trend of rapid growth during the 16 years from 1994 to 2010. The research results of quality of life in China present different research topics in different stages, which is related to the national conditions at that time and reflects the development of scholars’ understanding in this field. This paper divides the research process of the quality of life in China into three stages and discusses the basic issues in its development stage. Stage I The preliminary stage of research on quality of life From 1980 to 1992, the study on quality of life mainly adopted empirical survey and multivariate statistical techniques to analyze and process the results, and constructed the structure, causes and results of Chinese residents’ quality of life from different dimensions. Its remarkable characteristics are that it is dominated by empirical research, and it has great academic influence by creating many achievements through international cooperation. Some of these achievements are local empirical studies conducted under the guidance of foreign theories, which have laid a solid foundation for the future research on quality of life in China. The 1980s was the historic stage of China’s transition from planned economy to market economy, during which the research mainly reflected the formulation of long-term planning objectives for social economic development. Therefore, the research indicators of government departments and academic institutions mainly focused on the objective fields. Some of the research results also noticed the structural relations among the index systems and how to connect them. Its basic characteristics are: first, these studies feature theoretical thinking of the constituent elements and structural relationship of quality of life. Second, they focus on serving the society, evaluating quality of life based on objective indicators, and providing planning services for government departments. Through the comparative analysis of the indicators on quality of life, we have a clear understanding of the development level of the country or a certain region and the existing problems or gaps in it, which provides evidence for the formulation and adjustment of national economic development policies. Stage II (1993–2001) The exploring stage of research on quality of life From 1993 to 2001, the number of research on quality of life increased continuously. Most of the academic achievements carried on the academic discussion or promote the research on quality of life of marginalized and special populations under the framework of the first stage. Its remarkable characteristics are that the number

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of researchers increased, the research field broadened, the research depth advanced, the branch of research expanded, but the classical empirical research decreased. Scholars mainly focused on urban and rural residents and their sub-groups such as college teachers, children with intellectual disability, senior citizens, urban migrant workers and so on. During this period, as China’s economy boomed, social problems mushroomed. The National Report on Social Development of People’s Republic of China published in August, 1994 stated that economic development does not automatically translates to social development. Many facts had proved that high-speed economic growth cannot directly solve the problems in social development, such as the destruction of the natural environment, the frequent occurrence of disasters, the decreased utilization rate of natural resources, the over rapid growth of population, the emergence of urban diseases, and the constant threat of newly-borne diseases. The grim social reality had told us that economic development was not equal to the general improvement of people’s quality of life. Objective indicators reflect only the quantity of social supply, but not the subjective state of whether people’s needs are satisfied. Therefore, the academic field began to explore the subjective index system related to the objective index, and began to study the quality of life of vulnerable groups. At this stage, the research content of quality of life presented a flourishing trend of free exchange, with both the prediction and analysis of objective indicators and the theoretical exploration of subjective indicators. But there was almost no communication and in-depth discussion of agreed issues among scholars. Stage III (From 2002 to present), the research on quality of life gradually becomes mature. After 2002, research on quality of life entered the stage where subjective evaluation has become the mainstream and began to integrate the theoretical frameworks into analysis on quality of life. The main achievements are: on the one hand, scholars began to publish in the form of works or in academic journals in the form of special issues; on the other hand, they began to apply the latest research of western academic circles to the study of China’s quality of life, which broadened the research topics and horizons. Its main characteristics are the internationalization of the discussion content, the branching of the research topic, the diversification of the research means and the integration of the latest theories. At this stage, a large number of studies focused on the subjective quality of life mainly for two reasons. Firstly, it once again reflected the profound transformation of social development outlook: from taking economic growth as the core to taking coordinated economic and social development as the purpose. Secondly, in recent years, influenced by international research, the research on subjective quality of life has become more popular, and the United Nations and the Chinese government have increased the funding for this research field so as to further strengthen the evaluation of Chinese residents’ quality of life, which put an equal emphasis on research of both subjective and objective indicators. Over the past 30 years, many achievements and progress have been made in the research and application of quality of life in China, for example, the acknowledgement that quality of life should be measured from subjective and objective dimensions; that subjective perception of quality of life should be evaluated from satisfaction and happiness; the formulation and improvement of part of the regional

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social indicators system, as well as special social indicators system; the development of quality of life scale for some specific population; and the introduction of research results to the world. However, there are also some problems that should not be denied or ignored. First of all, in the research and application of quality of life, theories of sociology and advanced analytical methods of statistics have not been fully emphasized and applied. There is still a lack of systematic and in-depth research (empirical research especially) on the internal relationship and characteristics of indicators of quality of life in different populations or regions. Secondly, in the past 30 years, research on quality of life in China has been conducted from the perspective of “taking what each needs”, lacking unified planning and horizontal communication. Finally, there is no publication of specialized journals or research reports on quality of life, and there is a lack of communication and exchange with international research. Standing on the new stage of economic and social development, the research content on quality of life should be richer, and the research methods should be more diversified. (2) The status quo and future orientation of research on quality of life in China In the past 30 years, the research of quality of life in China has been localized. Standing on a new starting point, we should broaden our research horizon, draw lessons from the achievements of foreign research, and further enrich and improve the research on quality of life. The basic trend and future orientation of the current research on quality of life in China are mainly reflected in the following four aspects. 1. Featuring objective evaluation indicators and lacking of subjective evaluation indicators Since Bauer published the paper collection Social Indicators in 1966, international researchers have formed two major schools in the field of indicators on quality of life. One was to study the objective social indicators, which is to study the objective quality of life; the other focused on subjective social indicators, namely subjective quality of life. In the early studies, objective social indicators were used for evaluation research, while subjective social indicators were rarely used, which is mainly reflected in the large-scale survey carried out by Lin and Lu (1987) in Tianjin and Shanghai and the sample survey carried out by Zhou Changcheng et al. in eight provincial capitals of China in 2004. Some investigations and studies like Lu et al. (1992) and Feng et al. (2000) all adopted the research method of combining subjective and objective indicators. These studies tried to find out the relationship and the basic characteristics of variables in different groups or at different time points by discussing the structure and causes of social life indicators, and on this basis, to build subjective and objective indicators models of quality of life. In the past 30 years, the research on quality of life in China has focused on explorations on objective indicators, which was reflected in the comparison and evaluation of the objective living environment by scholars at the national level or in different regions and periods, as well as the analysis of different aspects of life. Although in the research practice of quality of life, researchers tended to pay more attention to one aspect of objective measurement or subjective measurement due to the restricted

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research funds, survey scale and research preference, the academic field has basically reached a consensus on the integration of subjective and objective indicators on the theoretical level. Only the integration of the two can reflect the essence of quality of life more comprehensively. The World Health Organization’s Quality of Life system, the European Index of Life Satisfaction System and Canada’s Social Cohesion Index system served as examples of inspiring exploration in realizing the integration of objective and subjective measurement. The reason why the integrative measurement approach is emphasized is that the use of subjective indicators alone has its own defects. For example, some respondents may want to protect their privacy or fear of getting into trouble, so these indicators cannot reflect the real situation. Of course, the so-called objective indicators are still subjective to a certain degree due to the self-statement of the respondents. However, given the strong objectivity of these indicators, the information collected this way is more representative and veracious. The quality of life must be evaluated from two aspects: the supply of the society and the demand of people. This will be an indispensable choice for the future research on quality of life in China. 2. Mainly based on quantitative research methods and lacking of qualitative research methods Evaluating quality of life suggests that they normally take the form of data. Indeed, traditional studies of quality of life in China typically rely on social statistics. The data presented in quantitative form can be compared and accumulated, and can also be analyzed by multivariable model. Therefore, researchers can explore the connotation of quality of life from complex statistical analysis and huge amounts of data structure. Quantitative analysis can help us analyze more clearly whether the quality of life is getting better or worse. For example, quality of life indicators can not only showcase the specific characteristics of certain fields that people are concerned with, but also enable researchers to understand the trends of future development and change, and make similar comparison of the types across time, region and culture. We should treat quantitative research methods on quality of life with a prudent, rational, and scientific attitude, and carry out research in a rigorous and scientific way as far as possible to restore the original facts, avoiding the application of wrong statistics and inappropriate statistical methods. In the international literature on quality of life, people are also increasingly interested in qualitative research methods, and researches on quality of life for marginalized, special and common populations have been carried out, but these types of research have been almost a blank in the research on quality of life in China over the past 30 years. The shift from quantitative thinking to qualitative thinking has broadened the study of quality of life. Qualitative research focuses more on exploring the profound connotation and development and changes of quality of life, which is conducive to reflecting the social implications and cultural values of quality of life for individuals and others. In other words, qualitative research adopts the “subject-based” research method, trying to understand and analyze problems from the perspective of participants. As early as 1997, Parker has already used the qualitative research method to study the quality of life, mainly through the description of life experiences

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to determine the factors that affect subjective well-being. Different from quantitative research on quality of life, qualitative research method gives us a lot of illuminating inspirations, which not only helps to broaden research topics, but also can make up for the deficiency of simple quantitative evaluation and provide an important complement for the research on quality of life. It will be an inevitable trend to choose quantitative or qualitative research methods according to the needs of research. 3. Focusing on the building of single indicators while overlooking the multidimensional factors in the quality of life structure China’s research on objective quality of life focuses on the building and application of systems of indicators. It is common for different researchers to build a system of indicators with different dimensions, indicators, synthetical methods and weights according to their own understanding. Meanwhile, researchers used their own indicators system to compare and rank the quality of life of different groups and regions concerned (Feng, 2007). At present, the common comprehensive evaluation methods for building single indicators include synthetical index method, principal component analysis method, standardized scoring method, fuzzy mathematical method and so on. Scholars believe that through the compression of information, different indicators can be combined into class index and single index (summative index), which is of great convenience to the comparison of quality of life between and across countries. It also helps to attract the public’s opinion, expand the influence of research on quality of life among the public, and exert impact on the policy-making decisions and actions of government departments (Zhou et al., 2003). Noll also called for the building of summative welfare index when outlooking the future direction of social indicators research. He pointed out that, considering the growing economic and political integration in Europe, as well as the problems of globalization and the post-capitalist context, there was an urgent need for summative indicators that could be used to carry on international comparisons and which could synthesize various dimensions of well-being into a single measurement (Rapley, 2003). The advantages of single index mainly lie in the convenience of comparison and simplicity, so it is frequently used in the measurement of international quality of life indicators system. At present, most studies on quality of life in China tend to build single indicators. The main problems in this respect are as follows: first, the indicators systems constructed by these research are different from each other, so it is difficult to make proper comparisons of their research results; second, due to the macro and nonindividual indicators used in most of the studies, the normal case is that only the description and comparison of sample conditions are carried out, and empirical data are barely used to discuss and analyze various factors affecting the objective quality of life (Feng, 2007). As a result, there is a weakness in developing and improving research on the indicators that most effectively measure quality of life and on the relationships between variables in social life, namely their structural patterns. The disadvantages of single index can be made up by multiple indexes or multi-dimensional structural factors. As a matter of fact, in many small-scale academic studies, most scholars are willing to carry out multi-dimensional interpretation of the multi-dimensional structure of quality of life, which is conducive to

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a deeper understanding of the real state of different groups in different domains of life and the unravelling of social conflicts and practical problems hidden behind the statistics. It is certain that over the long run, future research on quality of life in China will highlight the multi-dimensional structural factors of quality of life while emphasizing the building of a single index. 4. Adopting mainly standardized indicators while disregarding regional cultural diversity Research on quality of life bears different spatial and temporal implications in different countries, regions and cultural backgrounds. This difference reminds the scholars in the field of research on quality of life that different standards should be followed while choosing the appropriate indicator system evaluating the quality of life in different regions and cultural backgrounds. Should we choose the standard systems proposed by international organizations or a more appropriate indicator system based on the customary standards corresponding to the cultural diversity of different nationalities or regions? Research of quality of life in China over the past 30 years has basically followed the standardized research model. In recent years, although there are many research achievements on the indicators system for special population, these studies are only stuck in the designing stage, and few studies are put into practice. To some extent, this situation reflects people’s desire for universal value in the building of system indicators of quality of life. As early as in the early 1970s, Swedish scholar Johnson have found that among various types of indicator systems on quality of life, such as the Demographic and Social Statistics System of the United Nations, the compendium of OECD well-being indicators, the general social statistical guidelines of Eastern European countries, and even the social trend reports of different countries in the world, there is a striking similarity in content (Johansson, 2002). This similarity not only reflects the mutual learning and exchange of different countries or regions in the field of social statistics, but also significantly reflects the highly consistent social concerns in these countries or regions with completely different political systems and cultural backgrounds. Veenhoven once questioned that some indicators (national quality of life) are in fact specific, more or less equivalent to having a “modern quality of life”, and in essence they measure the extent to which a country shares the characteristics of a dominant Western society… It is misleading to call it “quality of life”. Modernization is not the same as high quality of life (Rapley, 2003). Certain standard welfare indicators, such as income, life expectancy and school enrolment rates, have been challenged as well. As Noll pointed out, although there may be some widely agreed indicators in the same or even different societies, much of them is called a “standard” welfare indicator which is a manifestation of cultural (and even subcultural) relativity, and this is out of political and ideological considerations (Noll, 2000). Therefore, in addition to the standardized indicators system, it is particularly important to build a set of indicators system with its own characteristics according to the specific regional and cultural characteristics. In different time periods, different regions will have their own development idea in line with their own regional characteristics. In China, a society with 56 ethnic groups, indicators on quality of life should reflect local characteristics

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accordingly. We can benefit from Australia’s national citizenship project and “Quality of Life in Newcastle”, as well as the “Sustainable Seattle” project in the United States, so as to focus on developing region-specific and community-based quality of life indicators. It is foreseeable that the future research on quality of life in China must be based on the premise of standardized indicators model, and that more indicators models of quality of life will be developed in line with the actual development of local regions.

2.3 Dispute on Methodologies Used in Current Research on Quality of Life The Composite Index method, a comprehensive evaluation method commonly used for constructing a single index, mainly includes synthetical index method, standardized scoring method, dimensionless method, comprehensive scoring method. The index decomposition method is to find the indicator with the least important impact on quality of life through regression analysis. Both methods involve the interaction mechanisms between subjective and objective indicators. However, they vary in the mechanisms to deal with the interaction which represent different research value orientations. The former is to evaluate and compare the developments in every period or region, while the latter is to reflect the structural correlation among the indicators in depth and reveal the basic law of interaction among indicators, so as to achieve the purpose of understanding social phenomena. The Composite Index method is more applicable to policy research and evaluation, while the index decomposition method is more suitable for academic research and theoretical exploration. (1) The interaction mechanisms between objective and subjective indicators According to the current research, the indicator system of quality of life mainly consists of objective and subjective aspects (He & Zhou, 2002). One is the study of people’s living standards on the Scandinavia Peninsula, with a focus on the objective living conditions. The other is the study of quality of life in America that focuses on people’s subjective wellbeing. At first, the research on quality of life in China mainly focused on objective indicators. In 1982, for the first time, the Seminar on Social and Economic Indicators jointly organized by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and UNESCO in Beijing introduced social indicators in foreign countries to China systematically, providing a useful reference for the establishment of China’s social indicator system (Zhu, 2009). Under the influence of this seminar, various Party and government institutions, colleges and universities, and research institutions in China began to conduct research on social indicators, including other objective indicators such as population, labor, education, science, culture, health and social security. For a long time, the statistical office mainly recorded economic indicators, causing a lack of the diachronic data of social indicators and its inability to develop and evaluate a comprehensive social indicator system. At this stage, the indicators of quality of life were also reflected as the core contents of social indicators,

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so the measurement of living conditions represents measuring the quality of life. To some extent, quality of life in the early stage was basically measured by the levels of people’s objective living conditions, which in particular was demonstrated in the study of social indicators. Although the research on social indicators in China started later than other countries, it has developed rapidly and experienced the theoretical and applied stages. Before 1988, it focused on the theoretical research of social indicators and the establishment of a related system, which was characterized by developing the concept of social indicators, determining the scope of the social indicator system, and paying attention to the systematical framework as well as the connection and cohesion among indicators (Yuan et al., 1995:24). After 1988, the focus was shifted to applied research, the representative achievement of which was the key issue of “Social Development and Social Indicators” during the 7th Five-Year Plan period sponsored by the Institute of Sociology in Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and China’s National Bureau of Statistics. Twelve objective indicators were adopted, including resident consumption, income, food, housing, energy consumption, conveniences in life, spiritual life, and price index (Wu, 1991: 160). In 1987, fifteen indicators were used to compare and evaluate the level of social development, including resident consumption, income, food, clothing, housing, prices, labor insurance, welfare, and environmental protection, so as to measure the disparities and levels of quality of life in different regions (Wu, 1991: 192). In 1992, the number of the indicators mentioned above was increased to 23 in the study of the national indicator system of the moderately prosperous society, with new indicators such as communications, cultural expenditure, the decontamination rate of three types of wastes (waste water, waste gas, solid waste), and per capita indicators of consumer goods. These new indicators still put an emphasis on objective substances and conditions that affect the quality of life (Zhu, 1992a). At this stage, these scholars have successively constructed an indicator system to evaluate economic and social development in various ways. The application of social indicators makes the evaluation of quality of life more quantitative and scientific. The use of indicators also began to shift from objective indicators to subjective ones as well as the combination of subjective and objective indicators. For example, in 1987, some subjective indicators were included in the study of quality of life in the social indicators scheme proposed by the research groups of “Social, Economic and Scientific Indicators System” and “Shanghai Statistical Reform” organized by the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality and other units (cited from Lin and Lu, 1987). In addition, Lin Nan, a Chinese American sociologist, carried out a large-scale thematic survey on factors that impacted an individual’s perception of his quality of life in Tianjin. Twentytwo specific satisfaction indicators were divided into five categories including work, labor form and intensity, the working environment and conditions, the social prestige of occupation, social contribution, technical complexity, distance of workplace location, power, wages and benefits, promotion opportunities, physical conditions, family economic conditions, relationship with colleagues, leaders and friends, family life,

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the relationship between family members, housing, residential environment, spare time, and neighborhood (Lin et al., 1989). The continuous progress of the research on quality of life in China has always been accompanied with the dispute about the methodology of using subjective and objective indicators, which was similar to the related issues in the development stage of foreign countries. Wassman together with other researchers selected 41 cities in the United States and studied the relationship between objective and subjective indicators. They argued that in principle subjective indicators are determined by objective indicators, for example, an individual’s view about personal property security is related to the personal property crime rate in his area (Yuan et al., 1995:46). Generally speaking, there is not much correlation between subjective and objective indicators, with the correlation coefficient very low. However, it is certain that subjective indicators are affected by objective indicators to some extent, especially in underdeveloped countries and regions, where this effect is more obvious. At the academic and theoretical level, a consensus has been basically reached on the integration of subjective with objective indicators. Only the organic combination of the two can reflect the dynamic change of quality of life more adequately. The World Health Organization’s quality of life index system, the European social index system, and Canada’s social cohesion index system have made some useful exploration in achieving the combination of objective and subjective measurement. The organic combination of subjective and objective indicators has been thoroughly demonstrated in the recent study of quality of life in China. However, it can be said as a pity that many studies, including literature reviews, did not specifically distinguish the sources and specific uses of these objective and subjective indicators. In fact, the social indicator research in the early stage was the research on the process during which the subjective and objective indicators undergo dimensionless procession at first and get weighted by a series of statistical methods or the expert consultation method, and then the final comprehensive index is formed to evaluate the development in various periods or regions. As a matter of fact, the commonly used research method of quality of life in sociology is the index decomposition, which is to analyze the basic structure of society. Different research methodologies reflect different research approaches. The two methodologies have something in common but also have many differences. However, both methodologies are used to overcome the problems researchers encounter when they use either objective or subjective indicators to measure in research and to establish an interaction mechanisms model of subjective and objective indicators simultaneously in research. (2) Mechanisms of the Composite Index method in the research on the quality of life Mechanisms of the Composite Index method is accomplished in four steps: collecting data about objective conditions indicators from the statistical yearbook and government authorities at all levels, obtaining indicators that reflect people’s subjective states through a questionnaire survey or other forms of scales, then setting the certain weight to get these indicators weighted respectively and finally getting a composite aggregate index. At present, comprehensive evaluation methods commonly used for

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constructing a single index mainly consist of synthetical index method, standardized scoring method, dimensionless method, and comprehensive scoring method. The research method of quality of life based on composite indices provides a reference for the comprehensive evaluation of economic and social development. The total index calculated from a number of weighted representative indicators has become a benchmark to evaluate the development in various periods or regions, a “barometer” to test economic and social function, and a “wind vane” to predict economic and social development. In fact, the diversity of concepts of quality of life and the incomparability in different fields make it rather difficult to construct a comprehensive index of the overall quality of life, neither at the individual level nor at the group level. Differences and changes in quality of life must be assessed on each of the main components. And a comprehensive assessment of all components will inevitably ignore differences and changes in different specific components. Moreover, the evaluation index of quality of life determined by social development is always dynamic (Luo & Jiang, 2002). The inherent limitations of the method are as follows. First, the composite index compresses several indicators into a comprehensive value, not only losing a lot of information in the original indicators, but also making the results more abstract. Therefore, it is sometimes hard to explain its actual socio-economic significance. Second, it is difficult to reflect the whole picture of a society with an abstract composite value owing to the complex and multi-dimensional nature of social and economic phenomena. Thirdly, there is no universally recognized scientific method for the synthesis of indexes, especially for the weight distribution of indicators. A lack of a unified scientific quantitative standard will undoubtedly reduce the reliability of the index and thus limiting its specific application (Yuan et al., 1995:203). In addition, with reference to the Composite Index method, using either objective or subjective indicators has the same problems in the selection of indicators and the decision of weight. Any evaluation of quality of life index is aimed at different objects, periods, regions, and cultures. Therefore, when making a specific evaluation of people’s quality of life, it is not advisable to simply copy a comprehensive index. It is sensible to choose the quality of life indicators which can reflect the actual development of this region or the specific evaluation indices developed from the quality of life indicators of different research objects. But the problems of the practice above lie in two aspects: not only can the results not be directly compared, but researchers can’t talk directly with each other. In some cases, a stable set of indicators should be developed, so that comparisons can be made diachronically and transnationally. The Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI), Human Development Index (HDI), the quality of life index system of International Life, the European quality of life Scale and its weight are all established with universality according to the specific realities of many countries. However, China has not formed several internationally recognized indicator systems, which was perhaps greatly attributed to the imbalance of regional development and cultural diversity. For one thing, the same indicator has different importance in the development of different regions, and even in the same region, the contribution of various indicators is also very different; for another, various indicators also play different roles in different

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stages of development. In this way, in the process of index synthesis, the conclusions can vary a lot or even contradict each other, which can only be considered from the perspective of their consistency with real life. The Composite Index method is commonly applied in the research of statistics and management. Researchers conduct performance evaluations to monitor economic and social development mainly through a comprehensive index. In sociological and psychological research, the index decomposition method is more commonly used to discover the structural relationship among indicators. In order to observe the interaction mechanisms model of subjective and objective indicators in the study, a questionnaire survey is often used to collect the data of objective and subjective indicators. And then on the basis of clustering or refining, major factors influencing the quality of life can be found out through the regression method. It is the way how the mechanisms of index decomposition is formed. The objective indicators used by both methods generally do not cause too much controversy. But subjective ones are controversial because subjective evaluation is conducted based on certain reference framework, which is different from person to person and influenced by people’s experience as well as their judgment of the typical or possible state under certain conditions (Wang & Zhou, 2004). The two measurement methods respectively represent different research purposes. Using the Composite Index method needs to make clear which indicators are more important during the research, and then carry out the weighting. However, the index decomposition method usually finds out which indicators have the greatest influence on quality of life by statistical means, so as to improve the quality of life. (3) Mechanisms of the index decomposition method in the research on the quality of life Chen Yiping believes that, in order to achieve the organic coupling of subjective and objective evaluation indicators, a new scale can be designed to measure not only the reference standard that interviewees rely on for evaluation of a certain variable, but also the degree of people’s demand for life. In this way, not only the subjective and objective evaluation indicators are coupled together, but also the interaction mechanism and the interviewee’s evaluation method of quality of life can be clearly revealed, thus enhancing the explanatory power of the level of quality of life (Chen, 1999). The thinking goes as follows: (1) The objective evaluation index is the source of the model, functioning as the basis of producing domain satisfaction and subjective evaluation; (2) After considering the effect of intermediary subjective evaluation indicators on subjective feeling (satisfaction), the direct effect of objective evaluation indicators on subjective feelings can be ignored; (3) Apart from the restriction of objective evaluation indicators, subjective evaluation indicators are also influenced by reference standards, demographic characteristics and other factors (Luo, 2000). Therefore, the subjective evaluation indicators serve as the indirect reflection of the objective evaluation indicator, and involve the intermediary evaluative indicator with reference significance to some extent. However, during the research period when the structural equation model was not widely used to develop this mechanism, the

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breakthrough of this kind of research thought made by scholars reflected, to some extent, the confined realistic conditions that thought develops faster than method. The method mentioned above realized the “trinity” measurement. On the one hand, through the measurement of objective variables and reference variables, researchers understand respectively the reality of individuals and the individual reference or expectation standard, with the comparison of which individual satisfaction can be understood. In other words, this method can provide information and evidence for us to study quality of life in many aspects. On the other hand, using the method of stepwise regression through intermediary variables does not have a reasonable statistical basis to stand on in reality, owing to the fact the survey data are collected at the same time, which can only be a hypothesis of correlation mechanisms in most cases, and the causal relationship cannot be further inferred. From 1987 to 1990, Peking University’s Department of Sociology conducted research on the mechanism of subjective and objective indicators in the quality of life. They carried out an empirical research on the relationship between the quality of life and its subjective and objective indicators, the mutual effect between the objective and subjective indicators, the influence of respondent characteristics and the reference standard on subjective indicators, as well as some other issues. As a result, a three-level model that explained the role of subjective and objective factors in influencing the quality of life was formed (Lu & Wei, 1992), which has greatly improved the explanatory power of quality of life. The main thought is not to view subjective evaluation as a simple summary of facts, but to establish the intermediary subjective evaluation indicator on the basis of objective indicators, which further affect satisfaction. In this way, the intermediary subjective evaluation indicator itself is influenced by the reference standard, which is further affected by demographic characteristics, so the intermediary subjective evaluation indicator finally affects satisfaction with the dual nature of subjectivity and objectivity. Thus, a theoretical model of three-level subjective and objective indicators is established by setting intermediary evaluation indicators and ignoring the direct force of objective indicators on satisfaction. In the study, the stepwise regression method is used to screen out the more important and major influencing factors, and to reveal the potential causal and weight relationship through regression method and standardized regression coefficient respectively. This is the analytical method that index decomposition uses. Similar to the research methods of Lu and Wei (1992), Feng Xiaotian and Yi Songguo (2000) used the data of a large-scale social survey conducted in Wuhan in 1995 to find out the underlying factors of quality of family life through stepwise regression measurement from both subjective and objective aspects. Their research designed objective evaluation indicators such as household income, food consumption, housing area, housing facilities, household material and spiritual life equipment, the number of newspapers and magazines, housework time. In their research, subjective evaluation indicators of the satisfaction level are also designed, including housing condition, neighborhood, family member relationship, marital life and leisure life. Then, according to some conclusions of previous research, the reference indicator for horizontal and vertical comparison is specially designed, namely, the intermediary indicator.

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These two studies differ from previous studies in that they used a group-level approach rather than an individual-level one. The mainstream research on the quality of life takes individuals as the analytical unit, and individuals in the society as the core of the discussion. Therefore, using micro-level measurement (such as individuals) to study the medium-level contents (such as the quality of family life) will be suspected as the ecological fallacy, since decision utility and actual utility have different meanings in analyzing quality of life. Xia (1999) argues that from the concept of quality of life to the history of its research, it is not difficult to find that the quality of life originated and first developed in western developed countries. This fact has inspired Chinese scholars that the “individual-based” philosophy in the study of quality of life may be closely linked with western social and cultural traditions to a large extent. For the reality of deeply-rooted “family-based” philosophy in Chinese society and cultural tradition, “the quality of family life” may be a concept of great theoretical value as well as a research field of great practical significance (Feng & Yi, 2000). But the questions are as follows. Is it feasible to use individual interviews to capture “the quality of family life”? What is considered here, an individual’s imagination about “the quality of family life” or the overall feelings of the family members about it? Since a family consists of many individuals, it is worth considering carefully whether it is appropriate to use the method of understanding “the quality of family life” through the feelings of some individuals. In fact, “marriage satisfaction” and “residence satisfaction” themselves have a very strong correlation with “the quality of family life”. Therefore, this analytical method does not present a substantial difference from the study of quality of life in western society. Feng and Yi (2000) pointed out that when evaluating the quality of life of modern Chinese, the indicator of family life satisfaction is obviously of great importance, with the satisfaction of marriage life at its core. The family is the basic unit of society. Marriage functions as the link and bridge to hold the family together, and the marital relationship plays a vital role in all kinds of family relationships. Therefore, it can be understood why the satisfaction of the marital relationship is so important among all the satisfaction indicators. What’s more, men’s and women’s judgments about satisfaction differ significantly, with women generally more satisfied with marriage and family life than men. As a result, the research on the quality of family life is ultimately challenged by the approach of interviewing all family members rather than individuals. In addition, the measurement of people’s perceptions of their quality of life is bound to be conducted on the basis of individuals. Even if we examine the quality of family life or marriage life, we cannot analyze it in groups. After all, each individual has different values and feelings about the quality of life.

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References Andrews, F. M., & Withey, S. B. (1976). Social indicators of well-being. New York: Plenum Press. Bao, Z. H. (2013). Interpretations of “Happiness” and “the Sense of Happiness.” Journal of Shanghai Normal University (philosophy & Social Sciences), 01, 14–22. Bradburn, N. M. (1969). The structure of psychological well-being. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co. Cantril, H. (1965). The pattern of human concerns. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Campbell, A., Converse, P. E., & Rodgers, W. L. (1976). The quality of american life: Perceptions, evaluations, and satisfaction. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Feng, X. T., & Yi, S. G. (2000). Quality of life of urban households: Indicators and structures. Sociological Studies, (4). Feng, X. T. (2007). Quality of life research: A review of the last thirty years and related issues. Social Science Research, (6). Habich, R., & Noll, H.-H. (1994). Soziale Indikatoren und Sozialberichterstattung. Internationale Erfahrungen und gegenwrtiger Forschungsstand. Bern: Bundesamt fur Statistik. He, C. L., & Zhou, C. C. (2002). The concept of welfare and quality of life indicators: A study on the conceptual framework and structure of the European quality of life indicator system. Social Sciences Abroad, (1). Johansson, S. (2002). Conceptualizing and measuring quality of life for national policy. Social Indicators Research, 58(1–3), 13–32. Kerce, E. W. (1992). Quality of life: Meanmg, measurement, and models. Navy Personnel Research and Development Center. www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA250813. Land, K. C. (2000). Social indicators. Available from http://www.cob.vt.edu/market/isqols/kenlan dessay.htm. Accessed 8 November 01. Land, K. C. (1983). Social Indicators. Annual Review of Sociology, 9(1), 1–26. Lin, N., Wang, L., Pan, Y. K. et al. (1989). Research on structural model of social indicators and quality of life. Social Sciences in China, (4). Luo, P., & Jiang, X. L. (2002). Subjective and objective index for evaluating life quality and their unifying tendency. Market & Demographic Analysis, (2). Luo, P. (2000). Review of positive results of domestic quality of life indicator system research. Chinese Journal of Population Science, (6). Lu, S. H., & Wei, L. Y. (1992). Study on the mechanism of subjective and objective indicators of quality of life. Social Sciences in China, (1). Lin, N., & Lu, H. L. (1987). Structure and indicators of quality of life: Analysis of data from the 1985 Tianjin one thousand household survey. Sociological Studies, (6). Noll, H.-H. (2004). Social indicators and quality of life research: Background. In N. Genov (Ed.), Advances in Sociological Knowledge over Half a Century (pp. 151–181). Paris: International Social Science Council. Noll, H.-H., & Zapf, W. (1994). Social indicators research: Societal monitoring and social reporting. In I. Borg, & P. Mohler (eds.), Trends and Perspectives in Empirical Social Research. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Noll, H.-H. (2000). Social Indicators and Social Reporting: The International Experience.” http:// www.ccsd.ca/noll1.html. Accessed 17 September 01 Qin, B. X., & Zhu, C. Y. (1988). The Rise of Quality of Life Research in America, (3). Rapley, M. (2003). Quality of life: A critical introduction. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Song, R. (2006). A quantitative study on the relationship between leisure and quality of life: Overseas studies and Enlightment. Tourism Tribune, (12). United Nations. (1994). Information on social development publications and indicators in the united nations system. Working Paper No. 7. New York: United Nations Publications. United States Department of Health Education and Welfare (1969). Toward a Social Report. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. United Nations. (1995). Human development report 1995. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Veenhoven, R. (1996). Happy life-expectancy, a comprehensive measure of quality of life in nations. Social Indicators Research, 39(1), 1–58. Wang, K., & Zhou, C. C. (2004). New development in quality of life research: Construction and application of subjective indicators. Social Sciences Abroad, (4). Wu, H. G. (1991). Social development and social indicators. China Society Press. Xia, G. M. (1999). Family quality of life analysis of modern urban residents in contemporary China. Academics, (1). Yuan, F. et al. (1995). Social indicators and evaluation of social development. China Social Resources & Social Security Publishing Group. Zhou, C. C. (2008). Subjective quality of life: indicators and evaluation. Social Sciences Academic Press (China). Zhou, C. C. et al. (2003). Well-off society and quality of life: Indicators of quality of life study in an international perspective. Social Sciences Academic Press (China). Zhu, Q. F. (1992a). Comprehensive evaluation of the indicator system of well-off society and the target of 2000. Social Sciences in China, (1). Zhu, H. (2009). The construction and actual measurement of the evaluation system of China’s coordinated socioeconomic development (Doctoral dissertation). Tongji University.

Chapter 3

Theory of Quality of Life and Its Development in the Course of History

More than 20 years ago, according to Carley, a leading scholar in social indicators and quality of life research, there have been many attempts at constructing systems of social indicators and measures, but little in quality of life theory (Carley, 1981, quoted from Sirgy, 1986). He argued that social scientists should concentrate on developing and refining quality of life theory from which social indicators can be assessed. Without theory, questions can be developed regarding the construct validity of the existing social indicator systems. At present, a growing body of research has been done on the theory of quality of life, but there is still a lack of discussion on the various theoretical perspectives and arrangements of their mutual relationship. The development of quality of life theory is based on specific social and historical context. In fact, there exist some inheritance and development relationship among different theories. It is of theoretical significance for organizing and discussing the related thoughts. The theory of quality of life seeks to specify people’s experience of their quality of life and describe cognition, feelings and expressions by self-evaluation. Because of the different research perspectives, these theories vary in their understanding and viewpoint of things as well as their interaction with society. So, what are their main theoretical arguments? What contributions have they made to the selection and application of quality of life indicators? What standard should we follow today to evaluate their contributions and absorb the reasonable elements? Such issues will be mainly discussed in this chapter. There have been different opinions on quality of life since the study of happiness by ancient Greek philosophers, with each era leaving its own footprint. In order to fully explain the concept of quality of life, the questions of who can evaluate the quality of life, whose quality of life should be evaluated and what aspects of the quality of life should be evaluated need to be clarified. During the course of over 2000 years of discussions about quality of life, people’s evaluation standard has gradually developed from external evaluation on individual well-being to a modern system based on the two-way coupling of external and internal factors, achieving the transition from “externally compulsory evaluation” to the balance between attending © Social Sciences Academic Press 2023 P. Wang, Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2221-5_3

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to “external pressure” and respecting “personal autonomy”. It is called evaluation in that it is the value judgment of a third party on an individual or social state. If the quality of life evaluation is made by the government, it will certainly put more focus on material improvement or a combination of objective and subjective factors, but rarely take into consideration the understanding of and concerns for “inter-subjectivity”. The current application of quality of life evaluation, such as the theory of prudential value, emphasizes the understanding of life or being an individual for the individual under evaluation, which is more than the issue of “capability development” put forward by the capability approach. Only by figuring out the above problems can we make it clear what different schools are evaluating, researching and improving. Moreover, opinions are divided on the evaluative contents of quality of life by scholars in different historical periods. Scholars focused on the philosophical thinking of happiness before 1950 while putting the quantitative evaluation of quality of life into practice began in modern times. However, the ideological difference of schools lies in their various viewpoints on the evaluation mechanisms of quality of life. In ancient times, the reflection on happiness was to a larger extent based on an individual’s values on virtues as well as pain and pleasure. It was considered more from a person’s subjective feelings, which showed the relationship between material basis and pleasant experience at the philosophical level, but less from an individual’s development, macroscopic factors and institutional arrangement. It means that in modern and contemporary quality of life research, more emphasis is placed on the unequal ownership of goods, which leads to disparities in quality of life, and how the inequality of these goods is formed.

3.1 The Discussion About the Early Theories of Quality of Life Happiness is a key field in the quality of life research, the discussion of which is indispensable to the study of contemporary quality of life. The research on happiness in the West has a long history, which, the author believes, has experienced three major stages. The first stage is the classical ethics research from the perspective of rationalism, emphasizing happiness as the only good and carrying out research at the level of virtue and justice. The second stage is the research of utilitarian philosophy, in which the basic assumption of human nature theory is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Scholars of this stage believed that happiness is what people continue to pursue while pain is what people seek to avoid. A utilitarian society is one that strives to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number of its citizens. This stage is perceptual research characterized by the satisfaction of personal desires. The third stage is the multidisciplinary study of modern happiness, in which happiness is deeply rooted in economics, ethics, psychology, sociology and other multidisciplinary fields, and its research is conducted in the aspects of improving the long-term capability

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of individuals, achieving fair distribution among subjects and human sustainable development. The research of this stage not only attaches great importance to the multiple measurements of individual capabilities, but also to the impact of the institutional arrangements of the macro-social environment on individual happiness, so that the measurement of quality of life can be transformed from a balanced combination of philosophical thinking, single-dimensional construction, economic and social welfare to a modern measurement with the aim of improving individual capability and promoting the harmonious development of society, achieving the sublimation of theory and its application to the measurement of the course in different societies. The first stage of the research originated from the ethical and moral philosophers in 700 BC in ancient Greek. The understanding of happiness at this stage was mainly the reflection on virtue at the philosophical level and was developed on the basis of the previous research of modern philosophers, representing the epitome of their times and society. Some philosophers stressed the perceptual components of happiness. As the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus said, “Pleasure is our first and kindred good. It is the starting-point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we come back” (Luo & Song, 1985: 91; Zhou, 1987: 103). He believed that the origin of all other happiness stems from the pleasure of the body and sense organs. Without sensual happiness, there would not exist other kinds of pleasures (Xing & Huang, 2004). The empirical philosopher Locke explained hedonic happiness based on the principle of “maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain”. In Locke’s view, he regarded happiness as joy, which was inherited by the following representatives of utilitarianism such as Bentham and Mill. The perceptual view mentioned above has been questioned by some philosophers stressing the rational components of happiness. As Heraclitus said, “If happiness is the pleasure of the flesh, then a cow will be happy when it finds fodder” (Zhou, 1987: 13). Philosopher Aristotle put forward eudaimonic happiness in a complete and systematic manner. He believed that real happiness does not lie in joy and pleasure, but in “the chief good”. “To say that happiness is the chief good seems a platitude, and a clearer account of what it is still desired…so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function” (Aristotle, 1990: 12–13). Aristotle’s view of happiness was highly recommended by later advocates of asceticism, who emphasized that while restraining desires, people should unleash their potential to realize their value (Xing & Huang, 2004).

3.2 The Utilitarian Approach to the Research on Quality of Life For a long period of time, philosophers have measured people’s quality of life by utility. In the context of utilitarianism, utility is interpreted as happiness, or satisfaction of people’s desire or preference. Utilitarianism treats “happiness” as its moral purpose, which utterly overturns the traditional virtue teleology and hierarchical

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order. Moreover, it no longer regards God as the ultimate refuge of the sensible world, but takes real and worldly happiness as the ultimate end of people’s moral behavior and the standard for telling right from wrong (Tian, 2007). Its representative Bentham pointed out in the An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation that “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne” (Bentham, 2000: 57–58). It can be concluded that his theory of human nature is built on the basis of pursuing happiness and avoiding suffering. On this basis, utilitarianism connects morality with happiness and pain, and places moral judgment on the principle of pursuing happiness and avoiding suffering. Bentham pointed out that by utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness, (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community; if a particular individual, then the happiness of that individual (quoted from Zhou, 1987: 212). Bentham believed that “The interest of the community then is the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.” According to Bentham, what the government pursues is the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The criterion for coordinating the interests of the community and individuals is the maximization of happiness, in which the personal interests of most people are satisfied, and in the meanwhile the interests of the community are also maximized. Bentham pointed out that law and morality are the fundamental tools to ensure the development of the maximized happiness. Utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or the interest of every individual, as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and secondly, that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole (Mill, 2008: 17). Therefore, Bentham’s principle of utility is actually based on the greatest happiness principle to illustrate the relationship between individual actions, collective actions, and institutional arrangements. Under the guidance of this thought, Bentham put forward the principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. Based on the rule of thumb and away from metaphysics, utilitarianism only focuses on the outcomes of things, especially those enlarging the overall utility to the maximum extent, which makes it prone to criticism. So, how to measure the abstract concept of happiness? Bentham also proposed a program to measure the magnitude of happiness or pain. According to the “Happiness Calculation” program, Bentham came up with the calculation of people’s pain and happiness through the seven factors of “intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, purity, and extent”. The first four factors are applied to the value of a pleasure or pain considered by itself (Bentham, 2000: 87–88). And “fecundity” and “purity” can be used to consider the value of any

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pleasure or pain for the purpose of estimating the tendency of any act by which it is produced. According to Bentham, there is no difference in quality between happiness and pain, but only the difference in quantity. As a result, he listed 14 simple pleasures and 12 simple pains, thinking complex pleasures or pains were only a sum of simple pleasures or pains, without any fundamental difference. Although the above calculation ignores the influence of other factors on happiness and pain, it tries to construct a plural happiness calculation system, with a meaningful attempt to scientifically understand people’s happiness index. Mill has been influenced by Bentham’s utilitarianism from a very young age, firmly believing that happiness is the basic criterion of human behavior. However, against the background where class contradictions were becoming increasingly acute, Mill amended Bentham’s “principle of self-interest choice”, claiming that the standard is not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but that of all concerned. Mill pointed out that happiness is not mere the satisfaction of the quantity of desires. The pleasures of intellect including art, poetry, literature, and music, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, own a much higher value than those of mere sensation. In addition, Mill also amended Bentham’s “greatest happiness principle”. First, Mill believed that happiness is not only different in quantity but also in quality. As the book Utilitarianism says, “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”. As Mill pointed out that “what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s own happiness, but that of all concerned” (Mill, 2008: 17). Second, Mill distinguished happiness from pleasure, holding the view that happiness is the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain. The value of pleasure lies in that it is a component of happiness (Lü & Lü, 2009). Furthermore, Mill also emphasized that intellectual happiness is more important than physical happiness, and virtue is an important approach to achieving happiness. Admittedly, utilitarianism is one of the most widely applied and appealing theories in moral and political philosophy. Its theoretical merits are as follows. In complicated situations, the criteria for utilitarianism are explicit, simple to understand, and convenient. Being only consequence-sensitive, utilitarianism does not absolutely depend on metaphysical propositions, which can circumvent the difficulties faced by normative theories to some extent (Liu & Gu, 2007). The centrality given by utilitarianism to the self-assessment by each person of their well-being places great respect on the integrity, dignity and liberty of people as autonomous individuals. This is an important moral stance. But its handicaps are also evident in the following aspects. First, the concise expression of the utilitarian system results in its inadequate definition of the procedural legitimacy in its pursuit of happiness. In the view of utilitarianism, happiness is measured by utility, that is to say, our maximum utility can always be manifested by doing something pleasant, being either bodily and sensual happiness or spiritual pleasure and satisfaction, or virtue, money, power, health, etc. Therefore, the moral end and criteria of right and wrong bear a certain degree of subjectivity, illusion, ambiguity and relativity (Tian, 2007). The temperate life regulated by the law and morality can certainly be interpreted as a good life,

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while the indulgent life violating the law and morality is a departure from the quality of life. Second, utilitarianism is confronted by the problem of adaptation and mental conditioning, namely “adaptive preferences” (Sen, 2002: 52–53). The “happy slave” in life is the most frequently discussed example, in which the combination of poor objective conditions and good subjective feelings indicates that individuals lack awareness of the prudential value and they are in a state of self-satisfaction. For example, “Consider a very deprived person who is poor, exploited, overworked and ill, but who has been made satisfied with his lot by social conditioning (through, say, religion, or political propaganda, or cultural pressure). Can we possibly believe that he is doing well just because he is happy and satisfied? Can the living standard of a person be high if the life that he or she leads is full of deprivation? The standard of life cannot be so detached from the nature of the life the person leads.” (Sen, 1985: 8; Hu, 2010). Therefore, if utilitarianism is to resolve this paradox, its explicit explanation of “happiness” will be influenced for sure. Third, in Sen’s view, the utilitarian calculus only focuses on the total utility of personal benefits but tends to ignore inequalities in the distribution of happiness (Sen, 2002: 52–53). The greatest happiness principle of the greatest number does not pay attention to the fair distribution of happiness among individuals. And if the largest increase in happiness of the greatest number is made the only criterion to be examined, then it would be allowed to violate the legitimate rights of some people for the greater overall interests. At the practical level, utilitarianism is the manifestation of cardinal utility, since it advocates that utility can be used to measure the happiness that an individual gains from consumption. Utility can be expressed by a specific numerical value. The utility of different individuals gaining from consumption can be compared with each other, and be added up to the aggregate utility of the members in society. In the practical manifestation of utilitarian ethics, utility is doing what makes us happy. The formula can be presented as: happiness = getting what you want = choosing to purchase and consume certain goods and services (Phillips, 2006: 63). In other words, our happiness can be measured by our purchases. But the point is that an increase in purchasing power or income does not necessarily equal an increase in quality of life, namely, an increase in utility. And this is also the most fatal problem in measuring the quality of life by income and purchasing power from a utilitarian perspective, which can be understood from two aspects. First, at the practical level, utilitarianism ignores the law of diminishing marginal utility in consumer behavior. Many scholars, including Sen, have indicated that utilitarianism ignores the differences in the demands of different individuals for the utility in the same unit while trying to maximize the aggregate utility. Smith once pointed out, “It is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the laboring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable.” (Smith, 1776/1972: 74). When given equal share units of utility, poorer ones can gain much higher utility than the better ones, because the better ones are in a situation where they can obtain utility units well, and more utility will

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cause diminishing marginal returns. Measuring utility through income or purchasing power will ignore the differences among groups, and this drawback is caused by the simple and explicit characteristics of utilitarianism. Second, decision utility or expressed desire does not necessarily equate with experienced utility. Often the person in life who holds and spends the money does so on behalf not only of themselves but of their families too in life. In a decision utilitybased approach it is assumed that the head of household spends the money in the most efficient and equitable way in maximizing the household’s utility (Becker, 1996). Phillips (2006: 67) believed that in many societies the majority of the population (i.e. children and very often adult females) do not have direct access to income at all but only to the goods and services provided for them by the male, head of household. Alternatively, they may be given access to a proportion of the household income with which to purchase goods and services. Therefore, decision utility or expressed desire cannot represent the overall utility of all family members. It is the goods and services that each member of the household has access to and the achievement of experienced utility that are central to their quality of life. As an important paradigm of happiness research, utilitarianism is an issue that Western philosophers have been pondering on and exploring strenuously. It regards people as the subject of freedom and autonomy, and enables them to actively choose their preferred lifestyle, which assuredly bears progressive significance, but has also been criticized due to the scarcity of intellectual rigor. At the theoretical level, it has strong subjectivity, elusiveness, ambiguity and relativity mainly to the objects it expounds; at the practical level, it cannot solve the internal problems of fair distribution and consumer sovereignty.

3.3 The Prudential Value Approach to the Research on Quality of Life The utilitarian approach to the research on quality of life is based on actual desires, taking the satisfaction of utility as the basic evaluation method, which overlooks the content of desires that people would satisfy if they knew all about them. Just like a rural resident who lacks education and rarely contacts with the outside world, his desire is restricted to his perceived life expectations, which makes him susceptible to forming a good perception of the daily life. Therefore, this kind of desire is a superficial desire without a full understanding of all aspects of the situation. The research on quality of life from the prudential value approach considers how to obtain a better life from the perspective of informed-desire. If quality of life is regarded as a good state of life or good living conditions, then prudential value is the content of how such a good state of life or good living conditions can be obtained. Prudential value was first established by Griffin (1986, 1996) and developed by Qizilbash (1997a, 1997b, 1998). As a value with special implications, its basic idea is to make human life better.

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American philosopher Griffin worked in the department of philosophy at Oxford University from 1996 to 2000. His construction of quality of life has its roots in his criticism of the three mainstream quality of life theories in 1986. The first is hedonism, which can be simplified as pleasure, mental states, or feelings. The second is preferentialism, which views quality of life as the satisfaction of individual preferences or desires. The third is perfectionism, which deems quality of life as the realization of a rational life. Griffin’s theory of quality of life is the result of philosophical reflection based on these three theories, the theories of quality of life that we have mentioned earlier; it evaluates the process of desire fulfillment in terms of whether it has value or not, and this evaluation is reflexive in nature. It is on this basis that Griffin formulated a list of quality of life based on prudential values. Griffin believed that prudential values are different from moral values or aesthetic values. Certain prudential values are shared by all human beings, and the cognition of these values is very important for us to regard each other as human beings (Qizilbash, 1996). In griffin’s theory of prudential value, the concept of “informed-desire” is of great significance, and the quality of life depends on the degree of fulfillment of desire. Just like Maslow’s theory of five hierarchy of needs, the hierarchy of human needs ranges from low to high, and the realization of high-level needs includes the satisfaction of low-level content accordingly. Griffin’s desire-fulfillment theory is also divided into different levels. From low to high, those desires are termed as “local desires” (Griffin, 1986) or “first-order desires”, “second-order desires”, “higher-order desires”, and “global desires” (Griffin, 1986). Griffin also proposed a concept of reflexivity, which is also very important in his list of quality of life. Reflexivity refers to an important premise of quality of life or an ability, without which the concept of quality of life cannot be fully applied to evaluate people’s lives. Only based on such informed-desires, can the evaluation of life quality reflect the evaluation of reasonable prudential value of an individual’s self-life or the value of internal experience (Blanc et al., 2014). Griffin listed things that could make life “better”—prudential value itself. “Prudence” is a technical characteristic used to describe values related to the good life, well-being, or interests, as distinct from general moral or aesthetic values. The list of prudential values is as follows (Griffin, 1996:29–30; Qizilbash, 1996): (1) accomplishment; (2) the components of human existence, including agency, autonomy, liberty, and having the basic capabilities that enable one to act (limbs and senses that work; the minimum material goods to keep body and soul together, freedom from great pain and anxiety); (3) understanding, including knowledge about oneself and one’s place in the world, keeping in touch with reality and getting away from chaos, ignorance, and error; (4) enjoyment, including pleasures, the perception of beauty, the enjoyment of the day-to-to textures of life; (5) deep personal relations— “deep, reciprocal relations of friendship and love…that contribute to making one’s life fulfilled.” Of the above items, only (2) and (4) are substantive values. The rest are nonsubstantive values that can help make your life better. According to Griffin, some items may be considered more important than the others. In the paper Dan Brock: Quality of Life Measures in Health Care and Medical Ethics, Griffin pointed out that

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happiness and autonomy are substantive values, while functions and desire fulfillment are not substantive prudential values at all but rather characteristics means to realizing such values. He further explained that the state in which desire is realized is not valuable, and that the realization of desire itself is a kind of prudent value, because frustration, boasting or autonomy in realizing desires are related to substantive value. Griffin’s list of prudential values, culturally-defined, modifiable, empirically detailed, and intellectually-critical, allows us to see which items can truly improve or decrease the quality of life (Griffin, 2008: 142–443). Qizilbash (1997a, 1997b) suggested that if we want to include some necessary conditions in the list of well-being, it is well worth listing them. As a result, Qizilbash amended Griffin’s prudential value items, and his list of prudential values is shown below (Qizilbash, 1998:67; 1996): certain, at least minimal, levels of nutrition, health, sanitation, rest, shelter and security; certain, at least minimal, capacities, including literacy and certain basic intellectual and physical capabilities; (3) self-respect and aspiration; (4) enjoyment; (5) autonomy or self-determination (“positive freedom”); (6) liberty (negative freedom); (7) understanding or knowledge; (8) significant relations with others and some participation in social life; and (9) accomplishment. This list is a variation on Griffin’s and is more clear, inclusive and comprehensive than Griffin’s. The list is mostly made up of intrinsic rather than instrumental values. For example, (1) and (2) are embodied as instrumental values, are regarded as basic needs, and (3) contributes to the realization of some specific values. According to Taylor (2013), intrinsic items can directly contribute to the quality of life, while instrumental items, such as access to health and the provision of housing, can indirectly improve people’s education level and life skills, and finally improve the quality of life. Actual desires can be ascertained by asking and/or observing, and the calculation method is clearer. By contrast, the “good human life” established by informed desires is difficult to delineate from the empirical world. Moreover, Grinffin suggested that there were correspondingly different levels of desires, and that the higher the level the more difficult to observe. There is also the problem of overlapping levels. If a framework for informed-desire is to be formed, Phillips (2006: 71) argued that “a method needs to be chosen whereby a framework for identifying a set of informed desires can be constructed either by identifying empirical examples of well-informed desires from the real world within an inductive, positivistic theoretical framework or by constructing a set of rules for identifying such a set based on normative theory of informed desires. These are the two approaches to the construction of prudential value: the bottom-up approach and the top-down approach. The bottom-up approach induces more from the things that people feel happy for. The utilitarian approach and the capability approach below can be generally included. The top-down approach, on the other hand, makes judgments about the content of those prudential values that affect the quality of life and deductive inferences in definitions. Rawls held this view. He believed that things that resonated with people’s good life depend on how well they are in line with life planning and selected by the principle of prudential value (Rawls, 1999). The reason why an agreed value framework can be formulated is that the values in the framework are not objects of our desires, but are the actual existing values according to the object of our desire (Scanlon, 1993: 185–207).

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The problem is that it is not easy to agree on what makes life better or valuable. Some people who hold religious beliefs, for example, contend that humans are born to suffer in order to atone for their sins and to live better in the future (Sissela Bok, 2008: 218). These views are far removed from ordinary people’s perceptions of what constitutes the framework of good life. People may have different judgement on the indicators of informed-desire in different historical periods, sociocultural contexts, and ethnicities and races, and their expectations on core indicators are also completely different. Generalization in the framework experience of others’ informed-desire will also result in population sample selection bias. Therefore, Griffin and Qizilbash stated the methods and principles of selecting these indicators when constructing their prudential value theory. Griffin acknowledged that the prudential value items he put forward are culturally defined and subject to revision, but he pointed out that the prudential value will lead us to certain lists, and that shared human values would or should lead to the lists to having considerable similarities (Phillips, 2006). A convenient approach to the prudential value, as Qizilbash argued, probably is to examine the peculiarity of human life in essence and the context for human mutual intelligibility. The “mutual intelligibility” here realizes the transfer of the individual-based model to an intersubjective model more closely related to Wittgenstein’s propositions. Shared human values that promote mutual intelligibility are indispensable… Thus, at some fundamental levels, our understanding of language contains a cornerstone of shared values (Qizilbash, 1997a: 263). Phillips pointed out that these shared values are considered core prudential values and values which will make any human life go well (Phillips, 2006:73). Phillips believed that to find the actual desires of well-informed people is fraught with difficulties, and there is no consensus on what well-informed people ought to desire (Phillips, 2006: 71). Notions of what is right are firmly in the domain of ethics and moral theory and are highly relevant to discussions of quality of life. But these are exceedingly difficult and complex areas. More to the point, they are essentially contested among well-informed commentators and are at the highest level of conceptual abstraction. Thus, Phillips indicated that the task at hand is to address what is appropriate for well-informed people’s desires (Phillips, 2006: 72). Griffin (1986, 1996) and Qizilbash (1997a); Qizilbash (1997 b); Qizilbash (1998) have made important contributions to the theoretical foundation of predicting the good life and constructing the well-being by elaborating prudential value items. They also overcame the shortcomings of actual desires, and has brought about a significant turn in the research method of quality of life. The essentially one-dimensional, individualistic, and atomized utilitarian approach is shifted to an essentially multidimensional, social, and intersubjective approach to prudential value evaluation. There exist undoubtedly serious problems in utilitarian calculation, but it has the advantage of being clear and easy to learn intuitively. Calculation of the prudent value is very complex, but it is inevitable. How to arrange the order of the items in the list and how to conduct composite calculations are relatively more complex. Phillips pointed out that one great strength of prudential value lies in its appropriate representation of the complexity of values relevant to quality of life, including the “higher things

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in life” or what Grinffin calls “heavyweight values”—which are lacking in quality of life items from utilitarianism (Phillips, 2006: 80). But prudential values are more complex than utilitarianism and can easily be accused of being morally coercible or at least damaging to autonomy. Although prudential value has made philosophical thinking and great contribution to the theoretical construction of quality of life, there also exist some controversial problems. First, there is the question of how quality of life can be effectively evaluated. The quality of life project proposed by Griffin and Qizilbash is multidimensional and independent. How to empower indicators and evaluate them effectively is the core problem of analyzing quality of life through prudential value analysis. Qizilbash (1998) proposed the method of “component composition” to realize the composition between items. A basic question that follows from the compound theory is whether it is possible to create an overall well-being order based on such incommensurable prudential values (Qizilbash, 1997b, 2013). The answer given by Qizilbash is yes, and he used prudential value indicators for evaluation in developing countries (Qizilbash, 1997a, 1997b). The prudential value indicators selected are consumption per capita, infant mortality rate, life expectancy at birth, adult literacy rate, index of political rights and index of civil rights. Each country’s score on these indicators was then ranked, and these rankings were added up to give each country an overall score. The question is which indicators are more important, how much weight is assigned, and whether the composite of these indicators is comparable at different stages of development in different countries—questions that cannot be taken into account in the process proposed by Chizilbash et al. Second, the social imagination about the good life cannot be scientifically verified in the objective world. Griffin regarded shared human values as a “stepping stone” to create similar prudential value items, and if they are informed or have sufficient understanding, similar items of value will also be produced (Qizilbash, 1998: 65). Qizilbash claimed that the different prudential value items generated through prudential value evaluation are not culturally bound and the goal of the good life of human beings is independent of cultural, social or class background (Qizilbash, 1998: 70). It requires a relatively objective and shared vision and expectation of the good life, but this is just a good ideal in real life and finally makes it difficult to agree on the core items of prudential values (Phillips, 2006:79).

3.4 The Capability Approach to the Research on Quality of Life On the problem of how to measure the quality of life Amartya Sen, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, has come up with a creative concept for measuring quality of life: “capability”. Sen’s view of quality of life has transferred people’s attention from traditional goods and income to the pursuit of their valued capabilities. Sen’s elaboration of quality of life is closely related to the

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realization of substantial freedom, which has become another important theory for understanding the good life of human beings. Sen first proposed the concept of capability in a lecture at Stanford University in 1979, and later developed and refined the theory in several works and studies, including Development as Freedom. According to Sen, the acquisition of utility in life depends on the level of personal capability, and the more capable and functional a person is, the better his quality of life will be. Sen’s approach to capability is somewhat similar to the Scandinavian Model in the traditional research of objective quality of life. In the 1980s and 1990s, he developed the framework of “capability approach”, a basic framework for evaluating individual well-being and providing a theoretical basis for inequality research, poverty and national policy analysis. Former UN Secretary-General Annan once complimented that: “His works have produced the influence of revolutionariness for practice and theory of development by elaborating that our quality of life should not be judged by our wealth but by our freedom. The United Nations has gained great advantage from the wisdom and completeness of the viewpoint.” (Qian, 2004). Sen’s idea is that to measure an individual’s quality of life is to judge whether he has the capability to practice and pursue “functional activities” related to value objectives. “Functioning” refers to the states of “being and doing” in a person’s life, representing the completed activities. Sen uses “the actual capability of an individual to achieve various valuable functionings as a part of living” to evaluate the quality of an individual’s life. “Capabilities” refers to the set of valuable functionings that a person has effective access to. The set of functionings are activities people can complete, or “being healthy, being away from deaths brought by illness, having the ability to read, write, and communicate, taking part in the life of the community, to be able to ‘appear in public without shame’” (quoted from Wang, 2006). These related capabilities include not only those that avoid premature death, maintaining good health, receiving education and other basic requirements of one kind or another, but also a variety of social achievements, including, as Smith emphasized, to be able to appear in public without shame, and being able to participate in social activities (Sen, 2002). Capabilities are therefore also a kind of freedom, a substantial freedom to realize all possible combinations of functionings (or to put it in everyday language, the freedom to realize all kinds of different lifestyles) (Gao, 2013). As a core concept, capability is only a means to achieve individual quality of life. The ultimate goal is to achieve a combination of various functionings, and these functionings are in effect the key indicators to measure individual quality of life. Sen’s capability approach aims to promote income growth and finally improve the level of development by improving individual’s capabilities, thus achieving a leap from the improvement of individual capability to the improvement of the overall social quality. The capability approach is not only “able to take direct note of the importance of freedom, it can also pay substantial attention to the underlying motivations that contribute to the relevance of the other approaches” (Sen, 2002: 86). Hu (2010) pointed out that “functionings” as the core content of quality of life, has more to do with the freedom playing a constructive role, while “capability” is more reflected in the play of instrumental freedom. The essential freedom that Sen emphasized is actually the realization of the above elementary capabilities of human beings.

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In addition to the realization of elementary capabilities, the lack of social resources will also affect the realization of substantive freedom. “Freedom”, “functionings” and “capabilities” together constitute the core content of quality of life. As Hu (2010) said, “capabilities” are the subject of instrumental freedom and can itself play the role of constructing freedom. For example, participation in community life itself is not only instrumental support (instrumental role), but also an important part of a better life (constructive role). It can be concluded that freedom serves as a “lubricant” between capabilities and functionings, that is, what kind of capabilities people apply to achieve the corresponding purpose is affected by political freedom, economic freedom and other factors, and in turn, whether people can exercise the right of freedom to participate in community life and improve the quality of life depends on people’s actions to freedom. Sen objected the utilitarian approach, which advocates measuring the essential attribute of human development by the function of consumable goods. He advocated measuring it by the life people lead, because well-being reflects people’s yearning for a better life. Each person is settled in a different circumstance and their expectations of life are also different. The poor, for example, can have strong sense of satisfaction as long as they have enough food and clothes. Such a situation, in the utilitarian view, is worth advocating, but this does not mean that a person’s welfare is good enough. Therefore, according to Sen, a good life consists of at least three aspects: health, education, and access to resources. Its realization must rely on people’s capabilities and access to free and equal opportunities, which echoes with the first principle of distributive justice proposed by Rawls. Both of them believe the access to differentiated equality of opportunity rather than equal possession of basic public goods. While Sen offered a way for individuals to have more freedom to choose how they want to live their lives, whether this is a way defined by a particular society and shared by people’s core values is another question, given the diversity and weight of the functioning combinations. From the liberal view of rights to the utilitarian view of utility, the welfare economics view of wealth, and Sen’s view of capabilities, only the utility view directly equates pleasure, well-being, satisfaction, etc. with utilitarianism, while other rights, wealth, and capabilities are only indirect means to improve the quality of life. Sen argued that utilitarianism, income egalitarianism, and libertarianism have all excluded some important information in various degrees, and he emphasized that the capability of an individual to obtain the “content of life” that the individual values should be the core of the theory from a liberal perspective. By focusing on the perspective of interpersonal dissimilarity and equality of capability, Sen overcame the disadvantages of utilitarianism’s singular measurement and negligence of the role of psychological regulation, avoided the disadvantage of income egalitarianism’s difficulty in translating interpersonal differences between wealth and elements such as freedom, and avoided the dilemma of “devastating moral panic” caused by libertarianism, achieving in a real sense the improvement of individual sustainable life and the independent choice and free disposal of the good life. In addition, Sen noted that the equality of capabilities he discussed is not absolute equality in result, but equality in the process of achieving capabilities, adding to the philosophical consideration

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of interpersonal dissimilarity. Sen’s view of improving the quality of life through enhancing capabilities fully considers the construction at the basic level, such as access to individual education, basic medical care and nutrition, to wit, the minimum guarantee of access to basic public goods for individuals. Although Sen listed basic indicators of functioning combination, he did not give us basic indicators of capability. He refused to endorse that there exists an authoritative list of capabilities, because the framework of capability that he constructed was a general and flexible one. The framework was open to adding concepts of estimable purposes, individual interests, evaluation norms and social arrangements (Magni, 2004: 6; Yang & Zhang, 2014). However, Sen believed that some functional activities are basic, such as getting adequate nutrition and maintaining health, while others may be more complex, such as gaining self-esteem or having social integration, and that individuals assign different weights to these functionings (Sen, 2008: 37). It can be seen that Sen’s evaluation of functionings also took into account the differences of different options. What items should capabilities include? What capabilities can be taken into the list? Unlike Sen, Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago and Academician of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, developed Sen’s capability approach and distinguished the concepts of basic capabilities, internal capabilities and combined capabilities (Wang, 2006): (1) Basic capabilities are the innate equipment of individuals that is the necessary basis for developing the more advanced capability and the development of capabilities based on moral codes. (2) Internal capabilities are states of persons that are sufficient conditions for the exercise of the requisite functions… conditions that are ready to implement functional activities. In other words, physical maturity, sexual maturity, religious freedom, free speech. (3) Combined capabilities are defined as internal capabilities combined with suitable external conditions for the exercise of the function. Nussbaum also proposed a list of ten human functional capacities: life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses, imagination and thoughts, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other Species, play, and control over one’s environment (Nussbaum, 1999: 41–42). Phillips pointed out that there are four aspects where Nussbaum developed Sen’s capabilities approach. First, she argued for objective universal norms of human capability across cultural boundaries which therefore are not constrained by cultural relativism. For her, the good life is “non-relative”—in that it is invariant across classes, societies, and cultures. Second, her account of the good human life is singular: “…that should persevere liberties and opportunities for each and every person, taken one by one, respecting each of them as an end.” Third, Nussbaum is explicit about the functionings that make up a distinctively good life. Phillips claimed at last that as with prudential values Nussbaum claimed that there is component pluralism and irreducibility in her list: these are all separate and the scope for trade-offs between them is limited. Furthermore, a lack in any one of them leads to a shortfall in “a good human life”. Nussbaum’s capability approach encompasses all areas of prudential value and is a broad list of core human functionings and capabilities. In Nussbaum’s argument, there is a strong moral imperative to suppress inequality until everyone has reached the baseline of survival. Thus, Nussbaum’s approach put more emphasis

3.5 Summary of the Theories

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on moral intervention in equality and was less neutral in value than Sen’s capability approach (Phillips, 2006). Sen’s capability theory, further developed by Nussbaum, has established a detailed capability list, which measures the quality of life in a more diversified and comprehensive way. It not only emphasizes the interpersonal dissimilarity, but also highlights the mutual transformation of free functionings, and opposes the evaluation of quality of life by subjective utility standards. The realization of the list of capabilities can only be explained through the realization of utility, welfare, etc., A completely objective explanation of the list of capabilities often cannot reflect the feelings and emotions between subjects. The list of capabilities achieves external transformation with respect to freedom, income, functional activities, etc., but the transformation between the list of capabilities is also a very practical issue. In addition, what are the capabilities that should be developed when resources are scarce or affected by other external constraints? Which capabilities are more important? In Sen’s view, “It is certainly clear that some types of capabilities, broadly conceived, are of little interest or importance, and even the ones that count have to be weight vis-à-vis each other. But these discriminations constitute an integral part of the capability approach, and the need for selection and weighting cannot really be in any sense an embarrassment” (quoted from Gao, 2013). According to Sen, it is necessary to establish some normative principles if the list of capabilities is to be sorted. However, if it so, ethical issues of different priorities will be encountered regarding different events, which will ultimately impair the explanatory power of the theory of capabilities.

3.5 Summary of the Theories Although there are some arguments about the above two scholars’ list of capabilities, they have brought vitality to the research on quality of life by constructing the theory of functionings. The author believe that the implications of Sen’s capability theory to the today’s research on quality of life is as follows: first, more and more attention is paid to the content of different intersubjective quality of life experiences, trying to find a perfect list by constructing normative principles or social consensus; secondly, it transcends the metaphysical philosophical thinking of traditional utilitarianism and welfarism, and gradually reflects on the practical and operational indicators from the philosophical level and tries to work out the internal relations of these abilities. Third, beside “functionings” and “capabilities”, other core concepts such as “freedom” are analyzed as well. Emphasizing the “processes” of certain rights and principles as liberalism does, which is realized by giving them weightings, rather than being valued as vital as the liberalism argues. This chapter discussed three theoretical research approaches of quality of life: utilitarianism, prudential value and the capability approach. Leading scholars of the three approaches, all of whose ideas feature philosophical reflection, diverge fundamentally in their opinion of how to realize the human good life. The cause of such differences is closely related to these scholar’s age and social environment,

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3 Theory of Quality of Life and Its Development in the Course of History

which also reflects their life thinking upon the list of valuable desires. Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Since then, many western works can be regarded as reflections and discussions on the good life of human beings, namely the quality of life. From the measurement of actual desires to the fulfillment of minimum standards of living; from seeking the happiness of the many, to striving to make human life more prudent and better; and from simple and clear measurement indicators of quality of life to composite, multiple, coexisting of core and noncore values, the measurement of quality of life has become more pragmatic, more applicable to the evaluation of social development, and more focused on the building and thinking of the good life of human beings under the condition of autonomy.

References Aristotle. (1990). Nicomachean ethics. China Social Sciences Press. Becker, G. S. (1996). Accounting for tastes. Harvard University Press. Bentham, J. (2000). An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation (Shi, H. Y. Trans). Blanc, J., Boyer, L., Le Coz, P., et al. (2014). Metacognition: Towards a new approach to quality of life. Quality of Life Research, 23(2), 467–475. Carley, M. (1981). Social measurement and social indicators: Issues of policy and theory. London, Boston: Allen & Unwin. Gao, J. Z. (2013). The resource approach and the welfarism approach transcending equality. The Journal of Humanities, (1). Griffin, J. (1986). Well being: Its meaning, measurement and moral importance. Oxford University Press. Griffin, J. (1996). Value judgment: Improving our ethical beliefs. Clarendon Press. Hu, H. G. (2010). From neoclassicism to Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach. Economic Perspectives, (10). Liu, X. M., & Gu, S. (2007). Theoretical advantage of utilitarianism and its current development. Academic Monthly, (8). Luo, G. J., & Song, X. J. (1985). The history of western ethic thoughts (Vol. China Renmin University Press. Magni, F. (2004). Metaethical issues in the capability approach. The Fourth International Conference on the Capability Approach. Mill. (2008). Utilitarianism. Shanghai Century Publishing (Group). Nussbaum, M. C. (1999). Sex and social justice. Oxford University Press. Phillips, D. (2006). Quality of life: Concept, policy and practice. Routledge. Qian, Z. (2004, April 26, P. 6). Substantial human freedom is the ultimate goal of development. Study Times. Qizilbash, M. (1996). Capabilities, well-being and human development: A survey. Journal of Development Studies, 33(2), 143–162. Qizilbash, M. (1997a). Needs, incommensurability and well-being. Review of Political Economy, 9(3), 261–276. Qizilbash, M. (1997b). Pluralism and well-being indices. World Development, 25(12), 2009–2026. Qizilbash, M. (1998). The concept of well—being. Economics and Philosophy, 14(1), 51–73. Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice (revised). Oxford University Press. Scanlon, T. (1993). Value, desire and quality of life. In M. Nussbaum & A. Sen (eds.), The quality of life. Oxford: Clarendon. Sen, A. (1985). Standardof living. Sen, A. (2002). Development as freedom (Ze, R, et al. Trans.). China Renmin University Press.

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Sirgy, J. M. (1986). A quality-of-life theory derived from maslow’s developmental perspective: ‘Quality’ is related to progressive satisfaction of a hierarchy of needs, lower order and higher. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 45(3), 329–342. Sissela, B. Thomas Scanlon: Value, Desire, and Quality of Life. In Quality of Life. Social Sciences Academic Press (China). Smith, A. (1776/1972). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. The Commercial Press. Taylor, T. E. (2013). Well-being and Prudential Value. Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly, 31(2), 10–17. Tian, G. L. (2007). The criticism of the classical Utilitarianism’s happiness teleology. The Northern Forum, (2). Wang, Y. P. (2006). Amartya Sen’s approach of capabilities: Applications in development economics. Economic Theory and Business Management, (4). Yang, X. H., & Zhang, G. E. (2014). A comparative study of amartya sen and Martha Nussbaum’s theory of capability. Academic Forum, (2). Zhou, F. C. (1987). Selected works of western ethics. The Commercial Press.

Chapter 4

The Diagnosis of the Structural Classification Scheme of Subjective Well-Being

Up until now, the research of objective quality of life in general has been adhering to the economic and social reporting tradition of western countries since the seventeenth century, but the focus is placed on the comprehensive progress of society and the coordinated development of human and environment. The research of subjective quality of life, on the other hand, focuses more on the investigation of people’s attitude, expectation, feeling, desire, value, emphasizing people’s happiness experience. The orientation of this type of research is often called “subjective well-being” research (Xing Zhanjun, 2005). As for the structure of subjective well-being, Diener (1984) believed that it mainly includes two aspects: (1) Affective measures, including pleasant affect (PA) and unpleasant affect (NA); (2) Cognitive measures, known as life satisfaction. These two measures are examined separately here as independent variables to study the effects of their main components on happiness as affective in orientation and satisfaction as cognitive in orientation.

4.1 Literature Review and Hypotheses of the Structure of Subjective Well-Being Subjective happiness in the research on quality of life refers to people’s evaluation of satisfaction with their living conditions according to their own value standards and subjective preferences. According to the study of Diener (1996), the subjective well-being of the vast majority is higher than the average level, so they assumed that there is a positive baseline affecting human beings. Diener et al. (1985) investigated the numerical range of life satisfaction. They found that within the range of scores from 5 to 35, the mean score of undergraduate samples was 23.5, and that of the elderly samples was 25.8, both of which showed positive life satisfaction. In another measurement, Diener and Suh (1997) found that 85% of Americans have positive subjective well-being. This seems to mean that the respondents as a group were © Social Sciences Academic Press 2023 P. Wang, Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2221-5_4

61

62

4 The Diagnosis of the Structural Classification Scheme of Subjective …

Fig. 4.1 The normal distribution of subjective quality of life. Data source: Cummings (2002)

neutral about their perceptions of life and tended to exhibit positive subjective wellbeing. The study of Cummins et al. (2002) described subjective well-being as an empirical normative standard, and found that the western populations’ average of subjective well-being was normally held at 70%–80% of maximum (Scale Maximum).➀ These measurements reflect the universality of human beings as organisms (Cummins, 2001). Based on multivariate analysis of the population, it was found that when the score is converted to the percentage score of SM and recorded in this way, the score of life satisfaction or subjective well-being yields a mean of 75 and a standard deviation of 2.5, which resulted from the life satisfaction or subjective well-being scores of the population sample (as shown in Fig. 4.1) and often falls within the range of 70–80% of the maximum measures.1 That is, 75%–80% of the world’s population are satisfied with their lives or have a subjective well-being score of 75 to 80. In domestic studies, Yang Yiyong et al. (2001) found that about 55% of people were satisfied with their living conditions annually, and about 45% were dissatisfied with their living conditions. The study of Wang (2007) also found that the subjective life satisfaction of urban residents in all fields remained above the mean value. In the collectivist culture represented by China, subjective well-being seems to reflect people’s expectation for harmony. Therefore, this chapter assumes that Chinese residents tend to show positive subjective well-being in their subjective well-being. As a psychological experience, the cognitive component of subjective well-being is susceptible to the influence of values, so it contains traits of rationality, while the affective component is manifested as the nature of internal experience, so it carries features of affections (Shen, 2006; Diener & Emmons, 1984). Affective components 1

SM =



Mean scores n



× 100.

4.1 Literature Review and Hypotheses of the Structure of Subjective …

63

include positive and negative affect, and subjective well-being can be measured by “affect balance” (referring to whether positive and negative affect are in a balanced state or out of balance). Generally speaking, people believe that satisfaction measured on the basis of cognitive measures reflects relatively stable and long-term attitude and intention, while happiness measured on the basis of affective measures only reflects an individual’s momentary or instantaneous affects (Campbell, 1981). Campbell (1976) contended that happiness belongs to the affective level. Positive affects involve love, optimism, self-esteem, happiness, etc., while negative affects involve depression, jealousy, anxiety, etc., While satisfaction is a cognitive level, which contains more indicators (McKennell, 1978; McKennell & Andrews, 1980; Organ & Near, 1985; Brief & Roberson, 1989), referring to the satisfaction evaluation of life as a whole and in various areas of life (e.g., work and love) (Diener, 2000; Pavot & Diener, 1993). From the very beginning, the evaluation of subjective well-being has been proceeding along two directions: one is the psychological research model represented by Bradburn (1969), which regarded subjective well-being as the balance of positive and negative affects; the other is the sociological research model represented by Campbell (1976), which regarded subjective well-being as a cognitive direction developed in the research on quality of life, namely life satisfaction. Both constitute the basic content of subjective well-being structure. Collecting and analyzing large sample data from different nationalities, Bradburn (1969) proposed that affects have two different and independent dimensions: positive and negative. Later, this view was recognized by the academic field, that is, positive and negative effects are relatively independent with their different influencing measures, and an individual’s score on positive affect does not necessarily predict his score on negative affect, and vice versa (Li, 2005: 15). At present, there are two basic views on the structure of subjective well-being: one holds that life satisfaction and affective components are separated from each other (Andrews & Withey, 1976); the other found a moderate correlation between positive and negative affect and life satisfaction (Chamberlain, 1988). Although there are different views on the relationship between components of subjective well-being structure, scholars generally agree that positive and negative effect and life satisfaction reflect different levels of content, and that life satisfaction as a cognitive factor, may be independent from positive and negative affect. Under this premise, this chapter focuses on the reasonability of the traditional research on the division of affective and cognitive measures. Diener et al. (1999) summarized the operational framework of subjective well-being in Subjective Well-being: Three Decades of Progress, arguing that the evaluation parameters of subjective well-being are life satisfaction and affect balance, and that life satisfaction is an individual’s global judgment and overall cognition of life state. Affect balance is the happiness state in which positive affect prevail, and it is an individual’s overall emotional response to various events in life. Only by separating the cognitive and affective components of subjective well-being can we better understand the essence of subjective well-being. Table 4.1 shows the basic structure and content of subjective well-being proposed by Diener (1999).

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4 The Diagnosis of the Structural Classification Scheme of Subjective …

Table 4.1 The basic structure and content of subjective well-being

Cognitive aspect

Affective aspect Pleasant affect

Unpleasant affect

Life satisfaction

Domain satisfaction

Joy

Guilt and shame

Desire to change life

Work

Elation

Sadness

Satisfaction with current life

Family

Contentment

Anxiety and worry

Satisfaction with past

Leisure

Pride

Anger

Satisfaction with future

Health

Affection

Stress

Significant others’

Finances

Happiness

Depression

views of one’s life

One’s group

Ecstasy

Envy

Data source: Diener, E Eunkook Suh M, Richard Lucas E, and Heidi Smith L 1999. Subjective Well—being: Three Decades of Progress. Psychological Bulletin, 125 (2): 276–302.

McKennell (1978) found that the variance contributed by the affective measures to subjective well-being was very small in general, and the variance was more brought by the so-called domain satisfactions, including job satisfaction, leisure satisfaction. And so on. As a result, measurements of subjective well-being are in many cases measurements of satisfaction rather than happiness. In fact, the study did not provide a satisfactory answer because the researchers did not make a detailed distinction between the two components of the subjective well-being structure. Subjective wellbeing, as a broad category, is operationally measured in the form of life satisfaction in most cases, so it is undoubtful that they drew the conclusion that satisfaction contributed greatly to the variance of the dependent variable. Generally speaking, the independent variables of cognitive in orientation and affective in orientation are clearly defined in the academic field, and there are also standard forms of questioning on the dependent variables. The single-item seven-level scale (“In general, how satisfying do you find the way you’re spending your life these days?”) developed by Andrews and Withey (1976) is mainly used to measure life satisfaction, which is a prudent judgment at the cognitive level; and “On average, how much of the time do you feel happy?” is measured with 10-point scale, the subjective well-being obtained by such measurement often reflects a transient or changing happiness at the affective level (Sun, 2008:87). A similar operation method of dependent variables will be adopted in this book to measure subjective well-being from two aspects of satisfaction and happiness.

4.1 Literature Review and Hypotheses of the Structure of Subjective …

65

However, Crooker and Near (1998) called into question the widely accepted argument that happiness measures were affective and satisfaction measures cognitive in orientation. They suggested that one approach to support their assumption was to treat happiness as the dependent variable and then assess the variance explained by affect, when the effects of other cognitive independent variables are controlled. If it is found that the affect variables explain no incremental variance in happiness, beyond that explained by the cognitive variables, then it can be considered that there existed serious problem in the classification scheme that had identified happiness as affective in orientation and satisfaction as cognitive. Crooker and Near (Crooker & Near, 1998) used the above research approach, analyzing five years of data from the GSS (General Social Survey) of the U.S. and the database of Andrews and Withey (1974). They found that after taking happiness as the dependent variable, the incremental variance contribution of affective measures is weak, and most of the contribution came from the influence of cognitive variables. Crooker and Near (1998) also pointed out, however, that there were two possible explanations for the conclusion of their results which were different from previous studies: first, the classification of variables as either cognitive or affective in orientations was not as clear as expected, that is, there was not necessarily a real distinction; second, the dependent variables of “happiness” or “cognition” may have attenuated the validity of the model in operation, because a more superior measure should be a multiple item. Similarly, a traditional psychometric rather than evaluative approach to the dependent variable “affect” may be less than standard. Based on the conclusions of Crook and Near, this chapter argues that the conventional assumptions about satisfaction as a measure of cognition and happiness as a measure of affect need to be further tested. Even though the traditional classification scheme has an undisputable position in the international academic field, it still cannot prove its applicability in Chinese society, especially in a typical collectivistic country. This chapter intends to adopt the survey data of CGSS 2003 and CGSS 20052 to discuss the following two questions: (1) Is there a positive baseline of subjective well-being for Chinese urban residents, which means they hold a relatively optimistic attitude towards life? (2) Is the traditional classification scheme that treats happiness measures as affective and satisfaction measures as cognitive in orientation reasonable? In the past, those 2

The data used in this study were quoted from the Chinese General Social Survey (Urban Section) (CGSS 2003) and the Chinese General Social Survey (Urban Section) (CGSS 2005) jointly conducted by the Department of Sociology of Renmin University of China and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology from October to November 2003 and from October to November 2005. GGSS 2003 survey covered 28 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities), 92 counties (districts), 299 streets, 590 neighborhood committees (communities) and 5,900 urban households, excluding Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Tibet, Qinghai and Ningxia. The survey used the data of the fifth National population census in 2000. PPS sampling was used to draw samples from provincial units to communities, and then 10 households were systematically sampled in each community. Kish table was used to draw one person from each household. The survey was conducted among 5,900 adults aged 18 to 69. The survey method was household interview, and 5894 questionnaires were returned. After data cleansing, the final sample size was 5894. CGSS 2005 had the same sampling frame as CGSS 2003. CGSS 2003 only surveyed some citizens, while CGSS2005 surveyed both urban and rural residents.

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4 The Diagnosis of the Structural Classification Scheme of Subjective …

questions have not been not tested in China, so its application in China will be the focus of this chapter. In summary, the following research hypotheses are proposed: Hypothesis 1: The subjective well-being of Chinese residents tends to show positive subjective well-being, that is, there is a positive baseline of people’s subjective well-being, and the self-reported score is higher than the average score. Hypothesis 2: In the subjective well-being of Chinese residents, the components of affective measure and cognitive measure have a significant impact on happiness and satisfaction respectively. Moreover, the affective measure contributed more to happiness and the cognitive measure contributed more to satisfaction. Therefore, the traditional classification scheme that treats happiness as affective in orientation and satisfaction as cognitive in orientation is applicable in China.

4.2 Variable Design and Research Strategy (1) Dependent variables The measurement of life satisfaction belongs to the cognitive measure of happiness, which is a kind of reflexive evaluation and judgment of quality of life or happiness. This kind of survey can be used to assess both the subjects’ satisfaction with their life as a whole and their satisfaction with the specific areas (work, marriage, health, environment, etc.); it can either yield self-reports of single item measurement (Cummins, 1998), or form composite measurement of multiple items. In the CGSS 2005 survey data, there are two questions related to the measurement of happiness with affective orientation and the measurement of satisfaction with cognitive orientation respectively, which are: (1) In general, how much percent do you think the happy part of your life will account for your whole life? (2) In general, how do you feel about the life you are leading? According to international practice, question (1) is regarded as the affective measure of subjective well-being, (2) as the cognitive measure of subjective well-being. The dependent variables are measured with a single-item self-report method. This measurement method is basically consistent with that of western scholars on happiness and satisfaction, but the difference is that many special studies adopted measures of dependent variables based on multiple items to enhance the validity of measurement. The core issue, however, is whether an individual’s subjective well-being can be measured, and how much validity this type of singe-item self-rated report holds. Wessman and Ricks (1966) found that subjective well-being was stable by conducting a long-term mood scale assessment on subjects. This suggests that individual subjective well-being is measurable. As for the measurement of a single item, previous studies have also confirmed the validity and stability of the scale. Andrews and

4.2 Variable Design and Research Strategy

67

Withey (1976) and Scarpello and Campbell (1983) found in the study of life satisfaction and job satisfaction measurement respectively that, measurements based on a single item are just as valid and reliable as measurements based on multiple items. (2) Independent variables 1. Variables based on affective orientation According to the basic structure and content of subjective well-being outlined by relevant research (Crooker & Near, 1998; Diener et al., 1999), four indicators of status including “health”, “pain”, “energy” and “emotion” were selected as affective measures for operationalization. Health and well-being are strongly correlated, but this is true only for self-reported health positioning (Frey & Stutzer, 2001: 64). People with good health reported higher levels of happiness than people with a sub-health status. The research of Bowling and Browne (1991) shows that the mechanisms of health does not affect people’s perception of physical condition, but mainly involves what they are capable of doing. Therefore, self-evaluated health status has an impact on subjective well-being. Life vitality refers to the feeling of energy sufficiency, such as energy condition and pain condition. Energy sufficiency and life vigor are considered to be essential elements of subjective well-being. Studies have shown that the influence of emotional measures on subjective well-being is more reflected by neuroticism, which is considered to be closely associated with unpleasant affects (Izard et al., 1993). Therefore, we believe that “affective status” is an important factor affecting subjective well-being. 2. Variables based on cognitive orientation Based on the basic structure and content of subjective well-being outlined in the above study, the variables as “horizontal comparison of socioeconomic status”, “vertical comparison of socioeconomic status”, “closeness to relatives/friends”, and “familiarity with neighbors/neighborhood residents” were selected as cognitive measures for operationalization. Social comparison theory suggests that subjective well-being is compared and evaluated by real conditions with a certain standard. Diener and Lucas (1999) found that happy people tended to make downward comparisons and unhappy people make both downward and upward comparisons; optimistic people tended to focus on the number of individuals who are worse off than they are, while pessimistic people tended to focus on the number of individuals who are better off than they are. Michalos’s (2003) multiple discrepancies theory posited that a person’s satisfaction with his life depends on the perceived gaps or discrepancies of several different domains. These discrepancies are the gaps between what one has and wants, and there are six discrepancies between: (1) self now/others now; (2) self now/self post best; (3) self now/self expected by now; (4) self now/self expected in future; (5) self now/self deserves; and (6) self now/self needs. By measuring these gaps, we can obtain information about personal life satisfaction. This method is mostly used to measure satisfaction in a specific domain of life. In other words, the horizontal comparison with others and the vertical comparison with oneself influence the individual’s satisfaction based on cognitive orientation.

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4 The Diagnosis of the Structural Classification Scheme of Subjective …

Ryff and Singer (2000) regarded friendly relationships as an important element of subjective well-being. Argyle (1987) mentioned the influence of social interaction and social network on people’s subjective well-being. He found that the most pleasant affection often occurs in the strongest relationship, and the social interaction between spouse and family can bring about the greatest impact on personal emotions. At present, there emerge more and more studies focusing on the influence of trust and social support on subjective well-being. For example, Baumeister and Leary (1995) regarded friendly relationship as an essential feature of subjective wellbeing. Mikulincer and Florian (1998) also believed that stable and satisfying interpersonal relationship was the most active influencing factor of subjective well-being across life space. Argyle (1999) found that the quality of interpersonal relationship was significantly correlated with subjective well-being, and friendly relationship ranked first among all the factors affecting subjective well-being. Therefore, as one of the components of subjective well-being, this dimension’s operational indicators are: “closeness to relatives/friends” and “Familiarity with neighbors/neighborhood residents”. Other independent variables are defined in Table 4.2. The CGSS 2005 data were selected in this chapter based on the following considerations: In the data of CGSS 2003, there were no dependent variables of happiness that take affective measures in orientation, nor were there any independent variable that can reflect affective measures. However, in the questionnaire design of CGSS 2005 data, the questions and answers of the happiness variable with affective measures in orientation are highly consistent with those of the independent and dependent variables in the GSS data used by Crooker and Near (1998), so that the comparison is both comparable and relevant. Moreover, some independent variables of cognitive measures are not reflected in CGSS 2003 data. Therefore, this chapter chooses CGSS 2005 data for analysis. In addition, variables with the values “I prefer not to answer”, “I don’t know”, “not applicable”, “not selectable” and “others” were reassigned as missing to simplify the statistical model.

4.3 Empirical Analysis and Research Findings on the Structure of Subjective Well-Being The analysis in Table 4.2 shows that the mean value of subjective well-being increased from 3.27 (out of 5) in 2003 to 3.45 in 2005, with a mean value of 6.14 for happiness. In the CGSS 2003 sample, 37.4% of the individuals felt “very happy” or “happy”, and in the CGSS 2005 sample, this figure reached 47.0%. Also, in the CGSS 2005 sample, this figure was 45.8% for the variables examining happiness. This shows that there is a positive baseline for people’s subjective well-being, and most people’s self-reported subjective well-being scores are higher than the average level with a

32.3 49.8

1896

2926

Happy

Generally happy 2.3

5874

Mean value 3.2736

Total

Overall

Standard deviation 0.80516

100.0

10.5

619

134

Unhappy

Very unhappy Mean value 3.445

6098

75

421

2735

100.0

1.2

6.9

44.9

40.2

6.8

Standard deviation 0.771

415

5.1

299 2452

Number of Ratio people

Number of Ratio people

Very happy

CGSS 2005

CGSS 2003

Subjective well-being of cognitive orientation

Overall

Total

10–20%

30–40%

50–60%

70–80%

90–100%

Subjective well-being of affective orientation

Table 4.2 Distribution of Subjective Well-being by Cognitive Orientation and Affective Orientation Unit: person, %

Mean value 6.1435

6098

298

753

2257

2228

562

100.0

4.9

12.3

37.0

36.5

9.2

Standard deviation 1.97215

Number of Ratio people

CGSS 2005

4.3 Empirical Analysis and Research Findings on the Structure … 69

70

4 The Diagnosis of the Structural Classification Scheme of Subjective …

steady improvement. As a group, they hold a neutral-to-upper attitude towards life. Therefore, hypothesis 1 is basically confirmed. Although the self-rated scores of people’s subjective well-being show a gradual upward trend, it does not mean that its level will unboundedly grow with the rapid economic development. As long as subjective well-being can be kept within a reasonable and relatively stable range of fluctuation, it indicates that people’s social mentality is normal and optimistic. To some extent, social mentality depends on the culture of the society which influences and shapes people’s subjective well-being (Cheng, 1984). Christopher (1999) argued that the definition of subjective well-being is rooted in culture and that all understandings of subjective well-being are essentially derived from moral visions and are based on personal judgments of what is “good”. Cultural norms, to some extent, tend to have a large impact on what emotions people have. Since the 1980s, a new pattern of social culture has emerged in China, which will inevitably lead to a certain degree of influence on traditional collectivistic cultural values which will ultimately be reflected in people’s subjective well-being. Therefore, the important task is how to exert the traditional dominant culture value to construct the rational value order that meets the needs of current social transformation to promote the improvement of people’s subjective well-being. Table 4.3 uses multiple linear regression coefficients to compare the regression results of happiness and satisfaction measures. The satisfaction analysis with cognitive measures as its measurement orientation is mainly reflected by the results of model 1 to model 4, and the happiness analysis with affective measures as its measurement orientation is mainly reflected by the results of model 5 to model 8. In model 1, all demographic characteristics variables are presented to be statistically significant. It has been found that including those corresponding reference groups, the group subjects who selfreported being happier were: women, the young and the old, the employed, the married, the highly educated, members of Communist Party of China, people with high annual income, homeowners, and people working in highly market-oriented sectors or departments close to the center of power. Cognitive orientation variables were added to model 2 on the basis of model 1, and the explanatory power of the overall model increased by 13.8%, indicating that these variables have strong explanatory power. Generally speaking, the variables that are added to models first have higher explanatory power. Affective orientation variables were added to model 3 on the basis of model 1, but the explanatory power of the overall model only increased by 7.9%, which suggests that the variables of cognitive orientation are the major measures explaining satisfaction, proving that the traditional classification schema of satisfaction with cognitive measures as the measurement orientation is applicable in China, and it is also corroborated that intrinsic aspirations (such as personal growth, autonomy, and secure relationships) provide people with a great degree of satisfaction, while extrinsic aspirations (such as money, fame, and attractiveness) do not provide such satisfaction (Ryan, 1995; Sheldon & Kasser, 1995). “Horizontal comparison of socioeconomic status”, “vertical comparison of socioeconomic status”, and “closeness to relatives/friends” all present statistical significance. In other words, those who feel their status has improved compared to their peer’s or their own status three years ago, and those who are more connected

−0.035*** (0.004)

0.008** (0.003) 0.055. + (0.029) 0.051*** (0.013)

−0.054*** (0.004)

0.001*** (0.000)

0.076** (0.025)

0.334*** (0.029)

0.011*** (0.003)

Age

Age squared

Employment status (employment = 1, other = 0)

Marital status (married = 1, other = 0)

Educational level

Political status (party member = 1, other 0.118*** = 0) (0.031)

Personal annual income (logarithmic)

Housing situation (rented = 1, other = 0) −0.170*** (0.024)

0.133*** (0.013)

−0.020 (0.019)

−0.071** (0.021)

Gender

−0.100*** (0.023)

0.278*** (0.027)

0.036 (0.024)

0.000*** (0.000)

2.010*** (0.144)

3.203*** (0.140)

Constants

B (SE)

B (SE)

Control variables

−0.161*** (0.023)

0.104*** (0.013)

0.111*** (0.029)

0.008** (0.003)

0.302*** (0.027)

0.042. + (0.024)

0.000*** (0.000)

−0.044*** (0.004)

−0.093*** (0.020)

2.228*** (0.141)

B ( SE)

−0.105*** (0.022)

0.043** (0.013)

0.056* (0.028)

0.006* (0.003)

0.263*** (0.026)

0.016 (0.023)

0.000*** (0.000)

−0.030*** (0.004)

−0.043* (0.019)

1.449*** (0.146)

B ( SE)

Model 4

−0.321*** (0.062)

0.327*** (0.034)

0.181* (0.080)

0.039*** (0.007)

0.464*** (0.074)

0.022 (0.065)

0.001*** (0.000)

−0.108*** (0.011)

−0.294*** (0.054)

5.258*** (0.362)

B ( SE)

−0.292*** (0.057)

0.225*** (0.032)

0.150* (0.073)

0.030*** (0.007)

0.358*** (0.068)

−0.091 (0.060)

0.001*** (0.000)

−0.075*** (0.010)

−0.371*** (0.049)

1.818*** (0.351)

B ( SE)

Model 6

−0.155* (0.060)

0.123*** (0.034)

0.025 (0.076)

0.032*** (0.007)

0.326*** (0.071)

−0.094 (0.062)

0.001*** (0.000)

−0.063*** (0.011)

−0.159** (0.051)

2.594*** (0.380)

B ( SE)

Model 7

Happiness (affective orientation)

Model 3

Model 5

Model 2

Satisfaction (cognitive orientation)

Model 1

(continued)

−0.176** (0.057)

0.089** (0.032)

0.022 (0.071)

0.025*** (0.007)

0.270*** (0.067)

−0.168** (0.058)

0.001*** (0.000)

−0.046*** (0.010)

−0.248*** (0.048)

0.276 (0.370)

B ( SE)

Model 8

Table 4.3 Multiple Linear Regression Coefficients of Various Measures on Differences in Subjective Well-being of Chinese Urban Residents (CGSS 2005)

4.3 Empirical Analysis and Research Findings on the Structure … 71

Model 2 −0.029 (0.041) −0.101* (0.040) −0.058 (0.037) −0.091* (0.042)

Model 1 −0.067 (0.044) −0.170*** (0.042) −0.097* (0.039) −0.111* (0.044)

State-owned institution

Collective enterprise

Individual business

Private enterprise/institution

Model 3

0.047*** (0.010) −0.002 (0.010)

−0.010 (0.010)

Pain condition

−0.106** (0.041)

−0.067. + (0.036)

−0.097* (0.039)

−0.026 (0.040)

0.072*** (0.010)

−0.128** (0.043)

−0.102** (0.037)

−0.149*** (0.041)

−0.055 (0.042)

Health status

Independent variables

−0.325*** (0.093)

Model 4

−0.069* (0.033)

−0.006 (0.159)

Model 5

−0.269** (0.086)

0.000 (0.145)

Model 6

−0.111 (0.089)

0.007 (0.152)

Model 7

Happiness (affective orientation)

−0.150 (0.115)

−0.132 (0.101)

−0.268* (0.110)

−0.167 (0.114)

0.015 (0.026)

0.135*** (0.025)

−0.217* (0.106)

−0.171. + (0.093)

−0.208* (0.101)

−0.148 (0.105)

Model 6

−0.052 (0.110)

−0.034 (0.097)

−0.119 (0.105)

−0.074 (0.109)

Model 7

Model 5

−0.133*** (0.035)

−0.064 (0.057)

Model 4

Happiness (affective orientation)

−0.071* (0.034)

−0.153*** (0.036)

State-owned enterprise

−0.045 (0.059)

Model 3

Satisfaction (cognitive orientation)

−0.066 (0.058)

Model 2

−0.047 (0.061)

Model 1

Satisfaction (cognitive orientation)

Government department

Nature of work unit (reference group = foreign-invested enterprise)

Table 4.3 (continued)

(continued)

0.026 (0.025)

0.089*** (0.025)

−0.117 (0.103)

−0.087 (0.091)

−0.108 (0.099)

−0.075 (0.102)

Model 8

−0.111 (0.084)

0.014 (0.143)

Model 8

72 4 The Diagnosis of the Structural Classification Scheme of Subjective …

89.120

5526

0.000

64.841

0.180 0.000

89.234

0.275

5341

0.006 (0.010)

0.143*** (0.013)

0.176*** (0.014)

0.242*** (0.018)

0.099*** (0.012)

0.035* (0.014)

Model 4

0.000

31.167

0.076

5526

Model 5

0.000

84.642

0.223

5526

0.485*** (0.032)

0.259*** (0.036)

Model 6

0.000

66.471

0.189

5341

0.036 (0.027)

0.362*** (0.034)

0.450*** (0.037)

0.704*** (0.049)

Model 7

Happiness (affective orientation)

Note. B is the unstandardized regression coefficient and SE is the standard error. + p < 0.10; * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

0.000

42.529 0.000

F

P

5341 0.239

5525

0.008 (0.010)

Familiarity with neighbors/neighborhood residents

0.101

0.162*** (0.013)

Closeness to relatives/friends

N

0.198*** (0.014)

Vertical comparison of socioeconomic status

Adjusted R Square

0.289*** (0.019)

Horizontal comparison of socioeconomic status

0.141*** (0.013)

Model 3

Emotional state

Model 2 0.045** (0.014)

Model 1

Satisfaction (cognitive orientation)

Energy status

Table 4.3 (continued)

0.000

93.278

0.284

5341

0.030 (0.025)

0.288*** (0.032)

0.358*** (0.035)

0.517*** (0.047)

0.403*** (0.031)

0.225*** (0.035)

Model 8

4.3 Empirical Analysis and Research Findings on the Structure … 73

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4 The Diagnosis of the Structural Classification Scheme of Subjective …

with relatives and friends are more likely to feel happy. When these variables were introduced, some of the variables in gender, employment status, political status, and nature of work unit would no longer be significant, indicating that cognitive orientation variables could explain some of the variation in these variables. Variables of affective orientation were also added to model 4 to test their variance contribution. The overall model indicates that the variables of cognitive orientation could explain people’s satisfaction to a greater extent. Among the variables of affective orientation, except for “pain condition”, which does not have significance on subjective well-being, other variables show a strong positive impact, i.e., in the last month, the more healthy people felt, the more energetic people felt, and the more emotionally undisturbed people felt, the more happiness they felt in life. All variables in the overall model have significance on people’s well-being in various degree, except for some variables in “employment status,” “familiarity with neighbors/neighborhood residents”, and “nature of work unit”, which remain insignificant. The happiness-oriented view of well-being holds that happiness is well-being, and happiness is formally defined as having more positive and less negative emotions, which attaches much importance to the individual’s own subjective evaluation of a short period of time. In model 5, some of the demographic variables such as gender, age, marital status, educational level, political status, personal annual income, housing situation and nature of work unit show significant influence on affective happiness, and the strength and direction of the influence are highly compatible with the influence on cognitive satisfaction. However, the explanatory power of the overall model was only 7.6%, which is 2.5% less than that of model 1, indicating that the effect of external factors on happiness is much weaker. Early foreign research also confirmed that demographic variables explain only part of the differences in individual happiness (Myers & Diener, 1995; Ryff, 1989). For example, Campbell (1976) found that demographic factors (e.g., education, age, social status, marriage) could only account for less than 20% of the variance in subjective well-being; Andrews and Withey (1976) also found that demographic variables predicted only 8% of the variance in life satisfaction; Argyle (1999) argued that demographic variables could explain only 15% of the variance in subjective well-being. Inglehart and Klingermann (2000) conducted an extended study of subjective well-being at the international level, involving a range of biological, cultural, and policy factors. Their evidence showed that genetic variables could explain 44%−52% of the variance in subjective well-being. These findings stated above are supported by Diener et al., who claimed that internal factors such as personality and genetics could explain 50% of shortterm subjective well-being and the increase of long-term subjective well-being to 80% (Diener et al., 1999, p. 215). Variables with affective factors as the measurement orientation were added to model 6 on the basis of model 5, and the explanatory power of the model immediately increased by 14.7%, indicating that the measurement of affective variables could largely explain the variation of happiness. Generally speaking, the variables that are added to the model first have higher explanatory power. Therefore, model 7 added the cognitive orientation variables on the basis of model 5, but the explanatory power of the overall model increased by only 11.3%, suggesting that the variables of affective

4.4 Discussion on the Structure of Subjective Well-Being

75

orientation are the major factors explaining happiness, and further confirming that the traditional classification schema of happiness with affective factors as the measurement orientation is also applicable in China. Therefore, hypothesis 2 is basically confirmed. “Health status”, “energy status”, and “emotional state” all had statistically significant effects on happiness, i.e., in the last month, the more healthy people felt, the more energetic people felt, and the more emotionally undisturbed people felt, the greater the proportion of happiness people would have in their lives. With the introduction of the variables of affective orientation, the “private enterprise/institution” variable became significant, i.e., the proportion of happiness of urban residents working in private enterprises/institutions is 0.20 times that of those working in “foreign-invested enterprises” (the reference) (1-e−0217 ). On this basis, after introducing the variables of cognitive orientation (see model 8), the variables of “employment status” became statistically significant, while all variables of “political status” and “nature of work unit” had no statistical significance, possibly because of variables such as “closeness to relatives/friends” that strengthened this relationship. Here, people’s feeling of happiness came more from the affective experiences in their lives, i.e., experiencing a lot of pleasant emotions, few unpleasant or painful emotions, and being satisfied with their lives. The model shows that happiness measured by affective measures is more often the results of people’s empowerment of pleasant emotions such as happiness, health, energy, and successful interpersonal relationships. Through the analysis of the regression coefficients from model 1 to model 8, it can be shown that the variables of gender, age, marital status, educational level, personal annual income, housing situation, health status, energy status, emotional status, horizontal comparison of socioeconomic status, vertical comparison of socioeconomic status, and closeness to relatives/friends all can show persistent significant relationships in models, and the intensity and direction of their effects highly correspond to each other. This fully confirms what Leo Tolstoy has said: “All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Also as Diener et al. (1999) emphasized after combing through the literature on subjective well-being over the past 30 years, that the happy person is blessed with a positive temperament, tends to look on the bright side of things, and does not ruminate excessively about bad events, and is living in an economically developed society, has social confidants, and possesses adequate resources for making progress toward valued goals.

4.4 Discussion on the Structure of Subjective Well-Being By employing the CGSS 2003 and CGSS 2005 database of Chinese urban residents, we divided subjective well-being into two parts (happiness and satisfaction) in accordance with international research practice, and we verified that this traditional classification scheme is practical and applicable to Chinese residents in responding to the hypothesized ideas that “satisfaction as a cognitive measure and happiness

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as an affective measure may be problematic”. In this chapter, we also find that the subjective well-being of Chinese urban residents is gradually improving. In the studies of subjective well-being, the two most commonly discussed measures of a good life are personal happiness and meaning in life (King et al., 2004; McGregor & Little, 1998; Ryan & Deci, 2001; Seligman, 2002). Obviously, on one hand, from the perspective of happiness measurement, the view of well-being mainly emphasizes personal happiness and a psychological experience, and people seem to place more emphasis on outcomes and temporary satisfaction of desires, which is of a strong pragmatic spirit. On the other hand, from the perspective of satisfaction measurement, the view of well-being mainly emphasizes the meaning in life, and people seem to pay more attention to self-actualization and the meaning of life, and the process of attaining happiness, which shows more ideal elements. Therefore, from this perspective, the traditional dichotomous schema and the division of structural factors it reflects are both very reasonable. In previous studies on subjective well-being, both the “cognitive” and the “affective” approaches have a common feature, i.e., they more or less overemphasized individual well-being, while many social factors, such as equality, fairness, freedom, safety or solidarity, which has a great impact on individual well-being, was neglected. Here, we will try to interpret the results of the models. The models in Table 4.4 show that the measures that influence happiness reflect more experiential variables, while the measures that influence satisfaction reflect more prudential value variables. Happiness is reflected through the variables of affective orientation, which reflects a utilitarian view of well-being in an abstract sense. Utilitarian takes the human nature of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain as its logical starting point, which claims that happiness is people’s common desire, and it is pain that people try to avoid. Philosophers such as Locke, Bentham and Mill were the pioneers of this idea. The happiness variables in the models in Table 4.4, such as “health status”, “energy status” and “emotional state”, all reflect the utilitarian view of well-being. Satisfaction is reflected by the variables of cognitive orientation, which in an abstract sense reflects the view of well-being with prudential value. Prudential value research starts with what people feel, expect, and act on, and emphasizes what they should and would want if they were fully informed. This view of well-being, founded by Griffin (1986; 1996) and developed by Qizilbash (1997a); Qizilbash (1997b); Qizilbash (1998), is based on the idea of making human life better and predicting a good life on the basis of freedom and humanity. The problem is that it is difficult to determine what people really want if they are fully informed. Therefore, scholars often use some variables to operate measurement, and put the most important variables in the front when conducting research. Variables such as “closeness to relatives/friends” are a core variable of prudential value and show a very significant relationship in the models. According to Qizilbash (1998), prudential value variables such as friendship and requited love are important for the preservation and continuation of the human species and therefore need to be placed closer to the core values. In Chinese society, where traditional culture is highly valued, people place great emphasis on family values, ethics, interpersonal norms, and the rule of ritual and music. The consideration of variables such as “closeness to

4.4 Discussion on the Structure of Subjective Well-Being

77

relatives/friends” and “familiarity with neighbors/neighborhood residents” can not only explain people’s prudent cognition, but also reflect the influence of traditional cultural norms on people’s subjective well-being. Model 2 in Table 4.4 shows that the satisfaction of urban residents was significantly affected by the variable “closeness to relatives/friends” but not by the variable “familiarity with neighbors/neighborhood residents”, which indicates that blood and industry margin relations, rather than geographic factor, have the greatest influence on urban residents, and that it is the quality rather than the quantity of the social network that affects people’s subjective well-being. In addition to the above two variables, we also investigated the two variables of “horizontal comparison of socioeconomic status” and “vertical comparison of socioeconomic status” in the satisfaction variables of cognitive orientation. It can be seen from the models in Table 4.4 that they have a very strong explanatory power for the variance of subjective well-being of cognitive orientation. In the studies of subjective well-being from the perspective of prudential value, these two variables reflect a process of “self-actualization” and have important value content. Phillips argues that the “friendship and requited love” variables like “closeness to relatives/ friends” need to be qualified by a “golden rule” provision in that one person’s freedom and agency must not be detrimental to the freedom and agency of others. In addition, “self-actualization” can lead to non-prudent outcomes if it is exercised unwisely (Phillips, 2006, p. 73). Qizilbash defends “self-actualization” and argues that mature human beings are typically given the choice of living their lives in various ways, of finding their own way. The exercise of that choice, even if it is abused, is part of what makes a human life valuable (1998, p. 64). This essentially reflects the value of well-being in Western individualistic cultures, and people in different societies and cultures judge their well-being in their own ways (Suh et al., 1998). In model 2 of Table 4.4, it can also be seen from the three measures of cognitive orientation that the elements which mainly involve good relationships, fulfillment of obligations, and expectations. These elements are what characterize the collectivistic culture of Eastern countries. Different from the view of well-being in individualistic culture, the main goal of the individual in the collectivistic culture is not to distinguish himself from others, but to strive to be consistent with others, and the individual’s thoughts reflect the group’s thoughts. Since the importance of the individual is gradually diminished, the individual’s feelings, emotions, and thoughts are not considered as the determining factors of behavior (Miao, 2003). The importance of happiness in life ethics is also relative and is often influenced by such cultural norms or value judgments (Ng et al., 2003). Therefore, in a sense, the goals and values of society restrict the actualization of people’s subjective well-being and also regulate the choice of content of subjective well-being. The existence of meaning field of collectivistic culture makes the individual’s subjective well-being have social expectations subjectively and takes subjective well-being beyond the scope of hedonism. In fact, achieving social goals and conforming to social expectations do not necessarily produce subjective well-being, but these norms are most likely to produce the idea of meaning in life; pro-social and moral behaviors do not necessarily produce so-called happiness either, but they do give meaning to life. Therefore, the meaning of life

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becomes the middle-level category for communicating personal goals and cultural norms, and makes people willing and able to deal with various problems in daily life and keeps individuals in good condition in society and in difficult situations. The measure used in this chapter is a structured questionnaire, which conforms to the mainstream of modern measurement of subjective well-being. By using this method, we try to be objective and avoid errors as much as possible, but there will always be biases and errors. Potential problems that may arise from over-reliance on self-report for measurement include social desirability, cognitive biases, and response stereotypes. People may respond to the subjective well-being questionnaire with social desirability, but this can lead to false increases in subjective well-being scores. Additionally, the order of the questions and other human factors can also affect the measurement of subjective well-being (Miao, 2003). Moreover, the data of CGSS is not a questionnaire specifically designed to measure people’s subjective well-being, so many of the questions do not really reflect what this chapter is trying to measure. Since the questionnaire uses a single self-report measure, which simply asks subjects how happy they are, this can often be useful in the initial stages of subjective wellbeing research, but there are inevitably plenty of problems. Since the single-item measure is too obvious, not only the subjects are easily affected by response bias, but they are also not conducive to cross-ethnic or cross-cultural research (Huang, 2006). Therefore, many other components and items to be measured need to be designed if the accuracy of the study is to be improved.

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Chapter 5

Empirical Research on Factors Related to the Subjective Well-Being of Chinese Urban Residents

Subjective well-being (subjective well-being) is an individual’s judgment and evaluation of their satisfaction with their quality of life (Veenhoven, 1991). Research has shown that subjective well-being provides an indication of the individual’s subjective welfare and utility level (Easterlin, 2001; Mcbride, 2001). For a long time, subjective well-being has been the subject of psychological and sociological study. More recently, economics has also begun research in this area and has made important progress (Easterlin, 1974; Ng, 1997). At present, there have been a number of empirical studies on subjective well-being in China for college students, high school students and other groups of youth, but little work has been done for urban residents (Shek, 2010; Shek et al., 2005). This paper will help fill that gap in the literature. In particular we analyze a number of factors affecting the subjective well-being of Chinese urban residents by using the China General Social Survey. We organize these factors into five sets for expositional convenience. I. Discussion on the Factors Affecting Subjective Well-being (1) Demographic factors The early theoretical study of happiness focused on how demographic factors affected subjective well-being. A large number of studies found demographic factors have only limited impact on subjective well-being. Factors such as gender, age, income, marital status and other demographic items generally explain less than 20% of the variance in subjective well-being. Research has found that: (1) women self-report higher levels of happiness than men (Diener et al., 1997; Blanchflower & Oswald, 2004; Clark et al., 2001); (2) subjective well-being has a U-shaped relationship with age, with a turning point between 30 and 50 years of age (Hayo & Seifert, 2003; Blanchflower & Oswald, 2004); (3) married individuals self-report higher levels of happiness than those in other states (Blanchflower & Oswald, 1998; Diener et al., 1997); (4) unemployment has a significant negative impact on people’s subjective well-being (Diener et al., 1997; Frey & Stutzer, 2002; Gerlach & Stephan, 1996). Unemployment means not only the loss of a reliable source of income but also the loss of social relationships and social status; the social cost of unemployment may © Social Sciences Academic Press 2023 P. Wang, Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2221-5_5

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be greater than its economic cost (Winkelmann & Winkelmann, 1998); (5) In China, political status is an important variable in that members of the Chinese Communist Party are generally representatives of the social elites and thus may have a higher sense of subjective well-being; (6) A number of empirical studies have shown that income has a significantly positive impact on subjective well-being (Clark et al., 2001); (7) Studies have found that education level has a significant positive impact on subjective well-being (Diener et al., 1997). Based on the prior research, this paper proposes that similar findings will be found for residents of urban China, i.e. that: Hypothesis 1–1: Women self-report greater subjective well-being than men; Hypothesis 1–2: subjective well-being has a U-shaped relationship with age; Hypothesis 1–3: Married individuals self-report higher subjective well-being than those in other states; Hypothesis 1–4: The employed self-report higher subjective well-being than the unemployed; Hypothesis 1–5: Party members self-report higher subjective well-being than others; Hypothesis 1–6: People with a higher income self-report higher subjective wellbeing; Hypothesis 1–7: People with a higher education self-report higher subjective well-being. (2) Fashionable consumption Pierre Bourdieu examined consumption, leisure, art appreciation activities and lifestyles of modern society in his later study of stratification. In his view, different models of lifestyle and taste is the means by which modern society manifests class distinctions between individuals and social groups, and is the principle of social distinction (Boudieu, 1979). In general, the more fashionable one’s lifestyle is, the more optimistic one assesses the current economic system, economic welfare and the future (Hayo & Seifert, 2003). We hypothesize hypothesis: Hypothesis 2–1: Individuals who perceive their consumption as more fashionable will self-report higher subjective well-being. (3) Relative deprivation A sense of relative deprivation is primarily composed of social comparison. Research has found that individuals’ sense of subjective well-being will be lower when comparing themselves with the happy people (upward comparison), and higher when comparison is made with those more unfortunate (downward comparison). Social comparison has strong predictive power of satisfaction judgments in many areas (Wu, 2000). Some work (Stutzer, 2004) suggests that every individual is involved in some form of social comparison, and it is one’s position relative to others that plays a decisive role in assessment. Other work (Alpizar et al. 2005) suggests that most people care about relative income, and happiness is largely based on having a relatively higher income. The hypothesis has been supported by some empirical research (Clark & Oswald, 1996; Easterlin, 1995). We thus hypothesize:

5.1 Data Sources and Methodology

83

Hypothesis 3–1: Individual subjective well-being will be inversely correlated with relative deprivation. (4) Work units The social division of “danwei” or work units has received some attention in Chinese social studies (Wang & Feng, 2005); prior to the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, much of Chinese society was organized around the place of one’s employment. The work unit would relate an individual to the Chinese Communist Party. The relation of one’s place of employment to elites within the government still exerts influence on opportunities in life and may thus be related to subjective well-being. Groups closer to the center of power and market- oriented sectors may thus have a stronger sense of subjective well-being. We thus hypothesize: Hypothesis 4–1: People in state-owned sector will have higher subjective wellbeing than others; Hypothesis 4–2: People have a stronger sense of subjective well-being in work units close to the center of power. (5) Regional division A city’s administrative level may have an impact on people’s subjective well-being. People in municipalities, cities with independent planning, and other sub-provincial cities may have a stronger sense of subjective well-being than those in other cities. People in the capital city of a province may have a stronger sense of subjective wellbeing than those in other regions. These cities may have advantages of location and material resources and may also be the focus of the government policy to stimulate economic activity (Lian & Jianzhong, 2006). Quality of life is influenced by the living environment (Helburn, 1982) and should be taken into account in research on subjective well-being. We hypothesize: Hypothesis 5–1: Individuals in cities with a higher administrative level will have higher subjective well-being.

5.1 Data Sources and Methodology Data come from the “China General Social Survey” (CGSS 2003) organized and imple- mented by the Department of Sociology of Renmin University of China and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology from October to November in 2003. The survey covered 28 provinces (municipalities), 92 counties (districts), 299 streets, 590 neighborhood committees (community) and 5,900 urban households of the whole nation except Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Tibet, Qinghai and Ningxia. This survey uses the PPS sampling method which starts from the provincial danwei to the community, then extracts 10 households in each community by systematic sampling, and then selects one person as the subject of investigation in each household by using Kish table. This sampling is conducted based on the fifth national census data in 2000. This survey selected 5,900 persons whose age ranged from 18 to 69 as

84

5 Empirical Research on Factors Related to the Subjective Well-Being …

the subject of investigation. In the end, 5,894 questionnaires were completed through face-to-face interview. Several measures of subjective well-being have been proposed. Veenhoven (1996: 22) suggests using the question, “Overall, how happy do you think you are?” with possible responses of “very happy, generally happy, not happy, or not at all happy.” Cummins (1997) notes that questions such as “How do you feel about your life overall?” have been widely used as indicators of subjective well-being. The General Social Survey (GSS) of United States in 1972 assessed subjective well-being with the question, “Overall, are you very happy, happy, or not very happy these days?” (Easterlin, 2001; Mcbride, 2001). Some investigations have modified the question as “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?”, asking the respondents to give a score between 1 and 10 (1 representing the most unsatisfactory, 10 the most satisfactory) (Charness & Grosskopf, 2001; Frey & Stutzer, 2000), or between 0 to 10 (0 indicating completely unsatisfactory, 10 completely satisfactory) (The German SocioEconomic Panel) (Ehrhardt et al., 2000; Gerlach & Stephan, 1996), or between 0 to 1 (Stutzer, 2004). On the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS 2003) the subjective well-being question is, “Overall, how do you feel about your own life”, and the possible responses are “(1). very unhappy (2). unhappy (3). generally happy (4). happy (5). very happy.” The question in CGSS 2003 is similar to the one used in the GSS, and is used here as the dependent variable in the analysis. As noted above the factors used as independent variables in the analysis we divide into five groups for expositional convenience. The first group consists of demographic factors including gender, age, political status, marital status and employment status, personal annual income and level of education. Means and standard deviations for these variables (where appropriate) are given in Table 5.1. The second set of factors consists of variables that indicate relative deprivation. There are three questions in the CGSS 2003 that can be used to assess the sense of relative deprivation of the participants; these ask the respondent to compare themselves (i) with their peers, (ii) with themselves 3 years ago, and (iii) with the normal people in their eyes, to see if the quality of life is “better”, “no different”, “worse” or “hard to say”. The response “better” scores 3, “no different” scores 2, “worse” scores 1 and the “hard to say” is treated as missing. Then we sum the scores of the three questions as the total score of respondent’s sense of relative deprivation. The lower the score, the stronger sense of relative deprivation. The third set of factors relates to consumption attitude, the question J2 in questionnaire in CGSS 2003 provides a scale about people’s consumption behavior. A high score indicates more fashionable consumption and a low score indicates a traditional consumer. Responses of “no answer”, “not know”, “not applicable” and “other” are considered as a missing response. There are thirteen questions in the CGSS 2003 that can be used to assess the consumption attitude of the participants; these ask the respondent to indicate the extent of their agreement with statements such as: (i) I always go shopping at the more famous store, (ii) I always go out by taking taxi or a private car, and (iii) Consumer durables in my home mostly are brandname, high-grade, etc. If an individual chooses a response of “very consistent” for the above questions, it is given a score of 2, “moderately consistent” a score of 1,

5.1 Data Sources and Methodology

85

“very inconsistent” −2 and “moderately inconsistent” −1. The sum of the scores of the thirteen questions is taken as the total score of respondent’s attitude towards consumption. The higher the score, the more fashionable the individual considers their consumption. The fourth group of factors concerns variables related to an individual’s work unit or “danwei” division. An individual who are current work unit is used for individual’s currently employed and an individual’s last work unit is used for those who are unemployed. The work unit is classified as one of: government department, stateowned enterprise, state-owned institution/collective enterprise, individual business, private enterprise/institution, or foreign-invested enterprise. The fifth set of factors concern region which is classified as one of: town, county, prefectural-level city, or municipality/provincial capital city. Measures of subjective well-being are often assumed to be ordinal variables in the economics literature, while in psychology and sociology they are often taken as a continuous variable. In general, similar results have been obtained when using ordered logit, probit, or complementary log–log models with ordinal outcome data or ordinary least squares with con- tinuous data (Ferrer-i-Carbonell & Frijters 2004; Blanchflower & Oswald, 2004). Ferrer- i-Carbonell & Frijters (2004) found that results were highly consistent on five key variables (age, income, marriage, children, and health) with the two analysis methods. Complementary log–log link regression models were used in this analysis but similar findings were obtained when using ordinary least squares. The complementary log–log link regression model (Long, 1997; McCullagh & Nelder, 1989) takes the following form:   Link γj (x) = θj − β T X = θj − [ β1 X1 + β2 X2 + . . . + βm Xm ] where here “link” is chosen as complementary Log–log and cj (x) is the cumulative probability of the for “jth” category with covariate values x i. e. the probability of being in category j or less, hj is the threshold of the “jth” category; X1–Xm are the independent variable of and b1–bm are the regression coefficients of these variables. The log–log link is used so as to avoid issues of misinterpretation of odds ratios which arise with common outcomes; qualitative conclusions, however, are similar irrespective of how the outcome is modeled. Coefficients for the model are exponentiated to obtain percentage increases in the log probability of higher subjective well-being. Six ordinal log–log link regression models are employed. Each model includes all of the demographic factors. The first model includes only the demographic factors; models 2–5 include the demographic factors along with just one of the four other sets of factors ie model 2 includes demographic factors and the consumption variable; model 3 includes demographic factors and the relative deprivation variable; model 4 demographic factors and the work unit variable; model 5 demographic factors and the region variable; and the sixth model includes all five sets of factors.

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5.2 Results Responses to the outcome question, “Overall, how do you feel about your life?” are summarized in Table 5.1. Results from each of the six models are presented in Table 5.1. As seen in model 1, the demographic factors account for 9.1% of the variation in subjective well-being and most demographic variables have a significant correlation with the subjective well-being. Females self-reported higher subjective well-being than males. The relationship between age and subjective well-being is U-shaped. People with higher income self-report higher subjective well-being. Party members reported higher subjective well-being than those who were not. Married individuals self-reported higher subjective well-being than unmarried individuals. Students, the employed and the retired reported higher subjective well-being than the unemployed. More specifically, the log probability of higher subjective well-being is 24% lower for men than women; the log probability of higher subjective well-being decreases with age but then starts to increase at a turning point of around 50 years; the log probability of higher subjective well-being increases by 81% as the personal annual income increases logarithmically one level; the log probability of higher subjective well-being is 25% higher for Party members than for others; the log probability of higher subjective well-being is 56% higher for married individuals than for unmarried individuals; contrasted with the unemployed, the log probability of higher subjective well-being for the employed, for the retired and for students are, respectively 26, 25 and 87% higher. Of the demographic variables only education was not found to be statistically significant in predicting subjective well-being. Based on these findings, our research hypotheses above concerning demographic variables are all confirmed with the only exception being education, Hypothesis 1–7. The consumption variable was added to the demographic variables in the regression in model 2. The results show that, controlling for the demographic factors, the more fash- ionable an individual’s consumption is, the stronger their sense of subjective well-being. The log probability of higher subjective well-being is increased by 4% for each level increase in an individual’s conception of how fashionable their consumption is. The finding confirms our second research hypothesis. Note also that when the consumption variable is included in the model, the regression coefficient for income is somewhat attenuated; this could provide evidence for fashionable consumption mediating the effect of income but this would require a fuller investigation. The relative deprivation variable is added to the demographic factors in the regression in model 3. This result is a substantial increase in explanatory power of the model which rises from a Cox and Snell R-Square of 9.1 to 21.9%, suggesting that this variable plays a central role in determining subjective well-being. The log probability of higher subjective well-being is increased by 49% for individuals with a relative deprivation score that is one level higher (i.e. who feel less relative deprivation). This confirms our third research hypothesis. The work unit variable is added to the demographic factors in the regression in model 4. The contribution of this variable’s explanatory power for subjective well-being is relatively minimal. Nevertheless, the

0.000

0.054

0.007

0.001***

0.591***

−0.003

0.225***

0.444***

Age squared

Personal annual income (logarithmic)

Education level

Political status (control group: non-party members)

Marital status (control group: unmarried)

0.071

0.221**

0.628**

Retired

Students

0.240

0.053

0.231***

0.080

Employed

Work status (control group: unemployed/laid off)

0.011

−0.098***

Age

0.045

0.036

−0.268***

Gender (control group: female)

Control variable

0.444

0.084

0.911*

0.064

0.160+

0.104

0.055

0.008

0.071

0.000

0.014

0. 044

(SE)

0.211**

0.463***

0.187**

−0.011

0.458***

0.001***

−0.096***

−0.266 ***

Model 2

B

B

(SE)

Model 1

0.434

0.126

0.121*

0.530***

0.139**

0.004

0.259***

0.001***

−0.065***

−0.205***

B

Model 3

Table 5.1 Regression coefficient adopted to predict subjective well-being

0.265

0.078

0.059

0.090

0.049

0.007

0.062

0.000

0.013

0040

(SE)

Model 4

0.645**

0.241**

0.248***

0.447***

0.216***

−0.007

0.589***

0.001***

−0.098***

−0.260***

B

0.240

0.072

0.057

0.080

0.046

0.007

0.055

0.000

0.011

0.036

(SE)

Model 5

0.680**

0.216**

0.212***

0.407***

0.207***

0.000

0.635***

0.001***

−0.497***

−0.282***

B

0.241

0.071

0.054

0.080

0.046

0.007

0.056

0.000

0.011

0.037

(SE)

Model 6

0.762

0.078

0.123

(continued)

0.537

0.092

0.075

0.116

0.060

0.528***

0.009 0.104+

0.082

0.000

0.016

0.449

(SE)

−0.003

0.202*

0.001***

−0.057***

−0.194***

B

5.2 Results 87

Model 2

Model 3

0.087

0.064 0.086

0.040 −0.087

Individual business

Private enterprise/ institution

0.050

(SE)

−0.118

B

Model 4

Collective enterprise/ institution

0.018

(SE)

0.064

0.396 ***

B

0.148*

0.004

(SE)

State-owned enterprise

0.041 ***

B

−0.104*

(SE)

State-owned enterprise

Work unit (control group: state-owned institutions)

Sense of relative deprivation

Consumption attitude

Independent variable

B

Model 1

Table 5.1 (continued) B

Model 5 (SE)

−0.049

0.024

0.011

0.029

−0.127+

0.352 ***

0.030***

B

Model 6

(continued)

0.120

0.082

0.120

0.086

0.065

0.022

0.004

(SE)

88 5 Empirical Research on Factors Related to the Subjective Well-Being …

Model 2

Model 3

−0.086

−0.121

−0.138+

0.113

B

Model 6

Note. 1. The variable of the models is “the self-assessment of overall feeling of your life”, and the link function is “Complementary log–log” 2. B is Unstandardized Regression Coefficient, SE Refers to Standardized Deviation; + P < 0.10; *P < 0. 05; **P < 0.01; ***P < 0.001

0.061

(SE)

−0.016

0.166

−0.001

B

Model 5

County

(SE)

B

Model 4

0.060

(SE)

−0.101+

B

Prefectural-level city

(SE)

0.058

B

−0.166**

(SE)

Municipality/ provincial capital city

City level (control group: town)

Foreign-invested enterprise

B

Model 1

Table 5.1 (continued)

0.080

0.077

0.076

0.254

(SE)

5.2 Results 89

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5 Empirical Research on Factors Related to the Subjective Well-Being …

findings suggest that individuals working in state-owned institutions have a stronger sense of subjective well-being than those working in government departments. All the other work unit levels do not appear statistically significantly different than working in a government department. Our findings confirm research hypothesis 4–1 but do not provide evidence for research hypotheses 4–2. The region variable is added to the demographic factors in the regression in model 5. This variable also makes a relatively minor contribution to the explanatory power of the model. The results do however, provide some evidence that the higher the administrative level of the city, the lower the subjective well-being. For example, when contrasted with individuals living in a town, the subjective well-being of people in municipality/provincial capital city and prefectural-level city have a log probability of higher subjective well-being which is, respectively lower by 15 and 10%. This provides evidence against our fifth research hypothesis. Model 6 includes all five sets of explanatory factors. As can be seen by comparing the explanatory power of model 3 and model 6, most of the explanatory power of the model is given by the demographic variables and the relative deprivation variable. When all of the factors are in the model, none of the work unit levels or regional division levels remain statistically significant at the 0.05 level. The effect sizes for the demographic factors are all attenuated except for marital status; employment status ceases to be statistically significant.

5.3 Discussion on the Factors Affecting Subjective Well-Being Several findings have emerged from out analysis. First we have confirmed, for Chinese urban residents, some of the same relationships concerning factors related to subjective well-being as had been previously reported for other populations. Namely, higher subjective well-being is associated with being female, higher income, being married and being employed and that subjective well-being has a U- shaped relationship with age. One finding that was not as expected was that the higher the administrative level of the city is, the lower the subjective well-being. This phenomenon may be somewhat similar to what is found in cross-border research, which has shown that individuals in rich countries do not necessarily have higher subjective well-being than those in poor countries. For example, in the World Values Survey in 1999–2000, Puerto Rico had the highest overall rank of happiness and life satisfaction whereas America ranked 15th. An individual’s sense of subjective well-being includes more than material targets, such as income, wealth, growth rate, etc., which are often used to measure individual welfare and national development (Wong et al., 2006). Another possible explanation for our unexpected finding concerning regional division may be related to our study being restricted to urban residents. This group may be relatively homogeneous with respect to being situated in reasonable economic conditions. Material

5.3 Discussion on the Factors Affecting Subjective Well-Being

91

conditions such as income and wealth help bring a greater sense of subjective wellbeing, especially in meeting people’s basic needs. However, after basic needs have been met, it may be that better material conditions produce diminishing marginal utility (Maslow, 1970: 100) or even no increase in subjective well-being (Fahey & Smyth, 2004: 23). It is possible that because the study was restricted to urban residents, nearly the entirety of sample had their basic needs met. That individuals living in cities with higher administrative levels had lower subjective well-being may then in fact indicate a residual sense of relative deprivation not captured by our relative deprivation variable. Finally, it should be noted that individuals answer the questions concerning subjective well-being in accordance with their own specific situations and their way of perceiving and judging happiness. Individuals living in cities with higher administrative levels may simply have different ways of perceiving and judging happiness. Another somewhat surprising finding was that although individuals working in state- owned institutions have a stronger sense of subjective well-being than those working in a government department, none of the other work unit levels were statistically significantly different from working in a government department. One possible explanation for this is that an individual’s subjective well-being from work may arise from a combination of power/opportunities that proximity to the government allows on the one hand and the exercise of professional expertise on the other (He & Changcheng, 2002). Individuals working for state-owned institutions may have both proximity to the government and also more opportunities to exercise their professional expertise as the nature of their work is more flexible, more professional and more autonomous. Individuals working for government departments may have less discretionary freedom; individuals in other work units do not have proximity to the government. Among the variables in the models, “relative deprivation” seemed to have the most explanatory power. Our finding on the importance of relative deprivation is consistent with research conducted by psychologist and Nobel Laureate Kahneman. Kahneman put forward a “prospect theory”, that temporal and social comparison can contribute to subjective well-being. Likewise Miclausi found that in considering twelve fields of satisfaction (satisfaction with health status, family satisfaction, etc.), seven demographic characteristics (age, gender, etc.) explained 53% of variation of general life satisfaction and 36% of variation of general life happiness, while using just three gap variables (“target—achievement gap”, “social reference gap”, “gap between the present between the best experience”), explained 45% of variation of general life satisfaction and 38% of variation of general life happiness. Our finding on the importance of relative deprivation may indicate that Chinese urban residents are living in a society still deeply influenced by a culture of egalitarianism in wealth, reinforced by repeated government promises of common prosperity over a economically polarized society (Lu, 2002: 41). China’s cultural tradition is often more concerned about equality of outcomes rather than equality of rights and opportunities. Being faced with rapid economic changes and a widening gap between the rich and the poor, comparisons (with other individuals and with the past and future expectations) may pose a significant threat to the subjective well-being of Chinese

92

5 Empirical Research on Factors Related to the Subjective Well-Being …

urban residents. The greater the intensity of social changes is, the greater potential there may be for inequalities and for a perceived relative deprivation that challenges individuals’ sense of subjective well-being. Our analysis is subject to several limitations. First, we have used a single item measure for subjective well-being and such single item measures may suffer from unreliability. The use of a single item on the questionnaire may also be subject to bias arising from tendencies to give a socially favorable response. The advantage of using this measure is that it was included in the CGSS data and is thus available for a large number of Chinese urban residents; however, relying on this single measure from the CGSS renders the data inapplicable for cross-national or cross-cultural research (Huang, 2006). Second, although our constructs of relative deprivation and fashionable consumption used multiple items, the measures employed in this study have not yet been used extensively and further work is needed to evaluate their psychometric properties and construct validity. There are perhaps particular challenges to the construct validity of these measures in the context of research in China. Two of the three items used in the measure of relative deprivation made reference to peers or other individuals. However, Chinese culture is greatly influenced by networks (‘ren qing’); the attainment of subjective well-being may reflect a certain reflexivity of self-worth (Zhao, 2001). Such issues with regard to relative deprivation are not unique to, but perhaps especially relevant for, the context of China. With regard to fashionable consumption, if what in fact matters for subjective well-being is an individual’s position in the social system (Weber, 1997/1996 [second volume]: 253–260; Liu and Lulu 2005), our fashionable consumption variable may be serving as an imperfect proxy for this. Third, other than the demographic factors and relative deprivation, the effect sizes for the other explanatory factors are modest and the practical significance of the findings concerning these other variables may thus be limited. Moreover, with the demographic factors, there is debate over the usefulness of such variables in explaining quality of life; many demographic factors are not subject to change. Our findings with regard to relative deprivation may thus be both the most interesting and the most practically important. Further research is required but it may be that the most immediate threat to subjective well-being in urban China is their living in a society changing dramatically and full of both opportunities and competition. As concerns subjective well-being, the economic transformation that China is undergoing is however, two-sided since our results indicate that increasing incomes and increasingly fashionable consumption both increase the subjective well-being of Chinese urban residents. Although the findings in this study are of some interest, the overall explanatory power of our largest model remains at 26.2%, indicating that there are a large number of important and unexamined factors not included in analysis. Variables such as social support may be particularly important. Future research could attempt to explore these other factors further.

References

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Chapter 6

Research on Differences in Subjective Well-Being of Chinese Urban and Rural Residents and Its Influencing Factors

In a typical society with an urban–rural divide, there is a huge difference between urban and rural areas in China (Cai & Yang, 2000). In 2007, the per capita net income of rural residents increased by 9.5% in real terms, which has been the largest increase since 1985; however, the income ratio between urban and rural residents expanded to 3.33:1, with an absolute gap of 9,646 yuan, the greatest gap since the reform and opening up (Huang & Mao, 2008). Behind this huge income gap, has the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents been affected? What are the influencing factors? How to interpret this influence rationally? This chapter will discuss and analyze these questions from the perspective of utilitarianism and prudential value.

6.1 Literature Review and Hypotheses of the Subjective Well-Being of Urban and Rural Residents According to the Analysis and Forecast of China’s Economic Situation (2005), the overall satisfaction of rural residents is much higher than that of urban residents, which is based on a survey of residents in 7 large and medium-sized cities, 7 small towns, and 8 rural areas in China in October 2004 (Zeng & Yuan, 2005). The finding has caused strong social reactions. Many people who hold skeptical or even negative views on this conclusion argue that, life satisfaction, as an indicator of welfare, can reflect people’s economic conditions, according to neoclassical micro-economic theory. It depends on the income and corresponds to the huge urban–rural income gap, so the overall satisfaction of urban residents should be higher than that of farmers, rather than the other way around. With the government’s reinforcing the reduction of agricultural taxes and fees, as well as increasing the agricultural subsidies in 2004, farmers’ income has increased considerably, but the huge divide between urban and rural income has not fundamentally changed. So how could we agree with the result that “farmers’ life satisfaction exceeds that of urban residents”? Therefore, it is © Social Sciences Academic Press 2023 P. Wang, Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2221-5_6

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believed that the subjective well-being level of rural residents “should” not be higher than that of urban residents. Through a household survey conducted in 2002 by the Income Distribution Group of the CASS on Chinese urban and rural residents, Luo (2006) reconfirms the conclusion that the subjective well-being of rural residents is higher than that of urban residents. He explains that the reason why rural residents have higher subjective well-being is largely related to lower expectations or desires, which in turn may be highly related to the fact that urban and rural areas are severely divided into two different social systems. Regarding the specious conclusion that “farmers’ life satisfaction exceeds that of urban residents”, Peng (2005a) explains that life satisfaction is influenced by desires, and since farmers and urban residents have different desires, the “level of happiness” represented by the same life satisfaction for them is not the same, so the life satisfaction of the two is not comparable. Since urban residents have more desires, the “level of happiness” they perceive is much higher, even though they have the same life satisfaction as farmers in the questionnaire. Urbanites, who answered only 70% of life satisfaction, were more likely to feel “happier” than farmers, who answered 90% of it. However, if people’s living environments are the same, they tend to have similar desires, and their life satisfaction would be comparable. Different from the findings stated above, Xing (2005a) sampled and measured the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents in Shandong Province with psychological scales. The study found that the current subjective well-being of urban residents is generally higher than that of rural residents. He explains that this difference reflects the objective gap in the economic and social development of urban and rural areas in China. Especially the urban–rural gap has been getting larger in recent years, and the impact of economic transition and social transformation on the perceptions and psychology of farmers is far greater than that of urban residents. Peng (2005b) also analyzed the welfare effects of urban–rural differences and occupational differentiation by using the satisfaction data of college students and the results showed that urban–rural differences and occupational differentiation produced significant welfare consequences that the life satisfaction of individuals in non-agricultural occupations was markedly higher than that of individuals in agricultural occupations. We found that the above findings followed a normative research approach in the process of data collection and empirical analysis. Since there was no relevant hypothesis established before the research, the selection of variables and the interpretation of the findings became a possible interpretation of such empirical results. Particularly in a society with an urban–rural divide, the mechanisms of subjective well-being in urban and rural areas are more complex, and therefore the research findings vary a lot. On the one hand, there is a close link to the quality of data collected by our research institution; on the other hand, our findings are correlated to the research design and objectives. After careful consideration, we can figure out different interpretations for the above research results, which is the explanatory divide between the utilitarian perspective and the prudential value perspective in the study of subjective well-being.

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In the study of subjective well-being from the perspective of utilitarianism, the moral purpose and the criteria of right and wrong of utilitarianism are subjective, illusory, ambiguous and relative to some extent (Tian, 2007). From the theory of utilitarianism, subjective well-being is based on psychological experience with highly subjective criteria, involving the satisfaction of all desires. This can either be physical pleasure or mental satisfaction. As long as it is the object of the actor’s desire, it can bring happiness to the actor and become the goal. This perspective has been criticized by theories such as prudential value because it fails to explain issues of “life adjustment” and marginal utility. In terms of the “level of happiness”, some studies believe that rural residents’ desires are low and their “amount of desire” is less than that of urban residents, which is probably the reason why rural residents are happier than urban residents. This involves “limited cognition”, that is, rural residents’ cognition of good life is not as high as that of urban residents. From the theory of utilitarianism, people’s happiness is built on actual desires, and it is incomparable to judge by the objects of their actual desires. If it is based on informed desires or rational choices, it is possible to conclude that urban residents are happier than rural residents, which is included in the theory of prudential value. Some of the above studies were presupposed theoretically on the basis of utilitarian practices, while the interpretation of the results moved towards the theoretical view of prudential value. Moreover, the model of the empirical study does not choose to control several variables of prudential value, so the resulting subjective well-being between urban and rural residents is still incomparable, because the finding itself may contain different people’s various aspirations for multiple versions of a good life. It is what the researchers have stated that “they are not living in the same environment”. Certainly, social phenomena are complex and cannot be exhausted, so they can be analyzed by excluding the influence of two core interference factors—the prudential cognitive variable and the relative deprivation variable. Accordingly, this chapter will conduct an empirical study from the utilitarian perspective and the prudential value perspective respectively to explore the differences and their influencing factors of the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents. From the perspective of utilitarianism, people’s self-reported “level of happiness” is used as the reference standard, which is also the comparison variable selected based on the previous research results, so here we will use the frequency description method to compare the differences between urban and rural residents. From the perspective of prudential value, it is mainly based on the indicators of “good life” listed by Griffin (1986, 1996) and Qizilbash (1997a, b, 1998), and 4 prudential value variables of “awareness of autonomy”, “awareness of political participation”, “capacity development” and “understanding” are included. These variables are compounded by multiple indicators and can represent some of the core prudential value indicators. Here we investigate the differences in subjective well-being between urban and rural residents by controlling these prudential value variables and their related variables, and then conducting a control analysis. Based on the above research results, we propose the following two hypotheses in this chapter.

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Hypothesis 1: from the perspective utilitarianism, urban residents enjoy more material and spiritual satisfaction than rural residents, that is, more experiential utility. Therefore, urban residents’ self-reported subjective well-being should be higher than that of rural residents. Hypothesis 2: from the perspective of prudential value, urban residents’ educational level and social vision are generally higher than those of rural residents, that is, the higher cognitive ability residents have, the higher expectations and desires they hold. Therefore, urban residents’ self-reported subjective well-being should be lower than that of rural residents.

6.2 Variable Selection and Modeling (1) Selection of Variables 1. Dependent Variables CGSS 2005 data is mainly used to conduct the research in this chapter. According to the commonly used inquiry method and the understanding of Chinese residents, a question specifically asking about the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents in the questionnaire is that “generally speaking, how do you feel about your life?” Respondents were asked to choose among 5 choices including “very unhappy, unhappy, generally happy, happy, and very happy”, and a family member was selected randomly to answer the question. 2. Control Variables The control variables are selected mainly from a number of variables that are often used in subjective well-being research at home and abroad, including gender, age, employment status, marital status, educational level, political status, personal annual income, and family size. 3. Socio-economic Variables The socioeconomic variables are selected mainly based on the urban–rural differences that affect subjective well-being. “Job satisfaction” has been regarded as the most important variable affecting urban residents’ subjective well-being (Lin et al., 1987), and it is one of the most important manifestations of urban residents’ social value. Moreover, “salary income” is becoming one of the main sources of income for rural residents. Therefore, it is of great analytical significance to consider this variable. Variables such as “evaluation of family’s socio-economic status”, “horizontal comparison of socioeconomic status”, “vertical comparison of socioeconomic status”, “judgment of one’s current income”, etc. mainly reflect the relative deprivation. Our study shows (Wang & VanderWeele, 2011; Wang, 2010) that all these

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variables are important factors that influence the subjective well-being of Chinese residents, so all of them are included in the statistical analysis. 4. Prudential Value Variables The prudential value variables are mainly composed of a series of questions added together, that is, taking their average values. The selection of these prudential values is a reflection of residents’ subjective views or judgments about various social phenomena. From the perspective of prudential value, subjective well-being is based on “what would people desire if they were fully informed”, in which the basic idea is to make human life better and predict a good life on the basis of freedom and humanity. The list of prudential values proposed by Griffin include: (1) accomplishment; (2) agency, autonomy, liberty, basic capabilities that enable one to act; (3) understanding; (4) enjoyment; and (5) deep personal relations (Griffin, 1996, pp. 29–30; 1986, p. 67). The list of prudential values addressed by Qizilbash is as follows (1998, p. 67): (1) minimum levels of nutrition, health, sanitation, shelter, rest and security; (2) certain basic intellectual and physical capacities and literacy; (3) certain levels of self-respect and aspiration; (4) enjoyment; (5) autonomy or self-determination (‘positive freedom’); (6) liberty (‘negative freedom’); (7) understanding; (8) significant relations with others and some participation in social life; and (9) accomplishment. Based on the core indicators of prudential values proposed by the above two scholars, the author selected questions E13, E17, E18, and F14 from the CGSS 2005 data and after calculating and processing them separately, a new variable was obtained, which was named “awareness of autonomy”, “awareness of political participation”, “capacity development”, and “understanding”. (2) Modeling In the literature on subjective well-being, the respondents’ choice of the degree of subjective well-being is usually regarded as an ordinal probability model, and therefore the methodology of it is often used to describe this selection process. Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters (2004) have compared the estimates of a linear model with those of an ordinal probability model and found that the difference between them is not significant, which is possibly because that the estimated coefficients of the linear probability model and those of the Logit and Probit models are similar. In order to better reflect the operational reliability of the models and their differences, here we will test them by employing two methods of binary logistic regression and Ordered Probit regression respectively. In the binary logistic regression model, the dependent variable is “generally speaking, how do you feel about your life”, and “very happy” and “happy” in answers are assigned as “1”, and “generally happy”; “unhappy”, and “very unhappy” are assigned as “0”. The model is as follows:  ln

 pi = β0 + β1 X1 + β2 X2 + β3 X3 + · · · + βk Xk 1 − pi

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where pi is the probability of having subjective well-being of urban and rural residents, and 1 − pi is the probability of not having subjective well-being. X1 –Xk are respectively the control variables that affect subjective well-being, socio-economic variables, and prudential value variables. β0 –βk represent constants and variable coefficients respectively. In the ordered Probit model, the dependent variable is “generally speaking, how do you feel about your life”, and the answer “very happy” is assigned as 5; “very unhappy” is assigned as 1. The model is as follows:   Link γj (x) = θj − βT X = θj − (β1 X1 + β2 X2 + · · · + βm Xm ) In the model, γj (x) is the cumulative probability where the ith sample is in the jth category; link is the link function; θj is the threshold value for the jth category; X1 –Xm are the predictor variables for the ith sample; and β1 –βm are the regression coefficients for these independent variables (McCullagh & Nelder, 1989). The ordinal dependent variable regression provides several link functions, and the Probit link function is chosen based on the actual distribution of the dependent variable of “generally speaking, how do you feel about your life?”.

6.3 An Empirical Research of Subjective Well-Being from the Perspective of Utilitarianism and Prudential Value (1) Empirical analysis of subjective well-being from the perspective of utilitarianism According to the research presupposition of the utilitarian theory, the comparison of subjective well-being can be conducted from the following two aspects: one is to compare the proportion of people who feel “happy” among different groups of people; the other is to assign values to different degrees of subjective well-being, and then compare the mean value of subjective well-being of two groups of people. Following the first approach, subjective well-being is set as variables of 0–1. Specifically, selfreported “very happy” and “happy” are assigned as 1, while “generally happy”, “unhappy”, and “very unhappy” are assigned as 0, also as the reference. With this approach, the subjective well-being of the urban sample is higher than that of the rural sample. Following the second approach, the subjective well-being can be ranked from low to high, with “very unhappy” as 1, “very happy” as 5, and so forth, so we can get the mean values of different subjective well-being. It can be found from Table 6.1 that the level of subjective well-being of urban residents (27.6%) is higher than that of rural residents (18.2%). Therefore, the “level of happiness” of urban residents is markedly greater than that of rural residents. We can conclude that from the perspective of utilitarianism, research hypothesis 1 is basically true.

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Table 6.1 Interaction analysis between urban–rural samples and subjective well-being unit: % Two samples

Subjective well-being

Urban residents State of happiness

Very happy

Total Rural residents

4.0 (6.8)

1.7 (4.1)

5.7

Happy

23.6 (40.2)

16.5 (40.0)

40.1

Generally happy

26.4 (44.9)

18.7 (45.4)

45.1

Unhappy

4.1 (6.9)

3.7 (8.9)

7.8

Very unhappy

0.7 (1.2)

0.7 (1.6)

1.4

58.8 (100.0)

41.2 (100.0)

Total

100.0

Note The sample size included in the analysis is 10372; the correlation coefficient between the two types and the overall state of happiness is λ = 0.069, with the significance p < 0.001. The numbers in the table represent the proportion of the number of people of this type to the total number of the sample, and the numbers in parentheses indicate the column proportions

(2) The Prudential Value Approach to the Empirical Analysis of Subjective Well-Being Individuals in a state of self-satisfaction may feel happier than those under better objective circumstances in the same society, because a higher level of utility may be allocated to the former group. From this perspective, self-reported subjective wellbeing scores of rural residents are higher than those of urban residents. However, such subjective experience is obtained without bearing prudential value in mind, so it is unreliable. This section will analyze the differences in subjective well-being between urban and rural residents by controlling prudential value variables. Table 6.2 presents the binary logistic regression analysis that reveals the differences in subjective well-being of urban and rural residents. Among the control variables, demographic variables such as age, income, marriage and other factors significantly affect the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents. In Model 1 and Model 4, other variables such as gender, political status, employment status, and family size cease to be statistically significant, which may be explained by other variables. By incorporating both urban and rural sample models, the study found that some variables differ between urban and rural areas. Women self-reported higher levels of happiness than men, which is not statistically significant in the three models presented in Table 6.2. The relationship between happiness and age manifested itself as a U-shaped curve, with a turning point around the age of 40. In other words, the closer one’s age is to 40, the less happier he/she is, which is consistent with our previous relevant research (Wang & VanderWeele, 2011). Married individuals self-reported higher subjective well-being than those in other states, which is also reflected in both urban and rural samples. In the urban sample, married individuals have a log probability of higher subjective well-being which is 151.7% higher than individuals in other states; in the rural sample, the difference of the log probability of higher subjective well-being is 111.6%. “Employment status” shows differences between urban and rural areas. In the urban sample, the employed have a log probability of higher subjective well-being which is 20.1% higher than residents in other

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Table 6.2 Binary logistic regression coefficients of various measures on differences in subjective well-being of urban and rural residents Overall sample (model 1)

Urban sample (model 2)

Rural sample (model 3)

B

Exp (B)

B

Exp (B)

B

Exp (B)

Gender (male = 1)

–0.096+

0.908

–0.080

0.923

–0.101

0.904

Age

Control variable –0.074*** 0.928

–0.083*** 0.921

–0.073*** 0.930

Square of age

0.001*** 1.001

0.001*** 1.001

0.001*** 1.001

Employment status (employment = 1)

0.179*

0.183**

0.275

Marital status (married = 1)

0.871*** 2.389

0.923*** 2.517

0.750*** 2.116

Educational level

0.021**

1.021

0.020*

1.020

0.021+

1.021

Political status (Party member = 1)

0.124

1.132

0.130

1.138

0.169

1.184

Personal gross income (logarithmic)

0.017

1.017

–0.024

0.976

0.075

1.077

–0.008

0.992

–0.018

0.982

0.014

1.014

0.001

1.001

0.001

1.001

0.000

1.000

Family size Square of family size

1.196

1.201

1.316

Socio-economic variables Job satisfaction

0.297*** 1.346

0.272*** 1.312

0.321*** 1.378

Evaluation of family’s socio-economic status

0.240*** 1.271

0.291*** 1.338

0.183**

Horizontal comparison of socio-economic status

0.624*** 1.866

0.691*** 1.996

0.578*** 1.783

Vertical comparison of socio-economic status

0.572*** 1.772

0.457*** 1.580

0.725*** 2.065

Closeness to relatives/friends

0.502*** 1.652

0.446*** 1.562

0.587*** 1.799

Mutual assistance with neighbors/residents in the same village

0.008

0.002

0.014

judgment of one’s current income

0.284*** 1.328

1.008

1.002

0.237*** 1.268

1.201

1.014

0.376*** 1.456

Prudential value variables Awareness of autonomy Awareness of political participation Capability development

–0.026

0.974

0.158*** 1.171 –0.064

0.099

1.104

0.195*** 1.216

0.938

–0.046

0.955

1.106

–0.036

0.965

Understanding

0.101**

Urban and rural measures (urban = 1)

0.302*** 1.352

–0.129+

0.879

0.118** –0.111

1.126 0.895

0.287*** 1.333

(continued)

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Table 6.2 (continued)

Constant

Overall sample (model 1)

Urban sample (model 2)

Rural sample (model 3)

B

B

B

Exp (B)

–6.885*** 0.001

Exp (B)

–5.769*** 0.003

Exp (B)

–8.293*** 0.000

Chi- square

12,560

10,800

6201

-2 Log likelihood

9,109,318

5,294,487

3,763,833

N

8253

4781

3472

Note The dependent variable of the model is “the self-assessment of overall feeling of your life”. And the dependent variable is binary. B unstandardized regression coefficient, Exp (B) odds +p < 0.10; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001

states, which does not show statistical significance in the rural sample. It shows that for most people in China’s cities, work units function as a place to settle down and get on with one’s pursuit. They are of great significance to the survival of urban residents. Educational level also presents differences between urban and rural areas. In the urban sample, the log probability of higher subjective well-being is increased by 2% for each level increase in an individual’s educational level, which has no significant impact on rural residents. It means that in regions with higher levels of industrialization (urban areas), a higher educational level has greater influence on subjective well-being, while in regions with lower levels of industrialization (rural areas), a relatively lower educational level is more beneficial for enhancing subjective well-being. Other control variables such as political status, personal gross income, and family size do not have a significant impact on the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents. Among the socio-economic variables, all variables showed significant statistical differences other than “mutual assistance with neighbors/residents in the same village”, which did not have a significant impact on the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents. “Job satisfaction”, “evaluation of family’s socio-economic status”, “horizontal comparison of socio-economic status”, “vertical comparison of socio-economic status”, “closeness to relatives/friends”, “judgment of one’s current income” and other variables have significantly affected the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents. In either the overall sample or the urban and rural samples, individuals who feel more satisfied with their jobs, who feel their family’s socioeconomic status has improved faster compared with their peer’s or their own status three years ago, who are more connected with relatives and friends, and who have a more reasonable perception of his/her current income, are more likely to feel happy. The log probability of higher subjective well-being of urban and rural residents will increase by 31.2% and 37.8% respectively for each level increase in “job satisfaction” while 33.8% and 20.1% respectively for each level increase in “evaluation of family’s socio-economic status”.

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In the prudential value variables, “awareness of autonomy” and “capability development” did not show significant statistical effects in the three samples. “Awareness of political participation” has a significant effect on the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents. The log probability of higher subjective well-being of urban and rural residents will increase by 21.6% and 12.6% respectively for each level increase in “awareness of political participation”. It shows that people have a strong sense of responsibility to society and hope to achieve better improvement of the society by paying attention to current events or issues. This variable in effect reflects people’s attitudes toward life or their spiritual outlook, which is also demonstrated in the urban and rural samples. “Understanding” has a significant impact on the overall sample. The log probability of higher subjective well-being of urban and rural residents will increase by 10.6% for each level increase in “understanding”. However, in the separate sample model in urban and rural areas, “understanding” only has a significant impact on the subjective well-being of rural residents. The log probability of higher subjective well-being of rural residents will increase by 33.3% for each level increase in “understanding”. This variable is compounded by issues such as an increase in taxes on higher-income groups and in opportunities for social mobility, indicating that the more enlightened and hopeful rural residents are in the future, the more subjective well-being they will experience. In the urban sample, there is only a negative correlation without statistical significance. On the whole, under the condition that other variables were the same, the subjective well-being of urban residents would be significantly stronger than that of rural residents. In the full sample (Model 1), urban residents have a log probability of higher subjective well-being which is 35.2% higher than rural residents. To some extent, it shows that urban residents will have a significantly stronger subjective well-being than rural residents when the prudential cognitive capability and socioeconomic conditions of urban residents and rural residents are equal. Therefore, hypothesis 2 is basically falsified. Table 6.3 is the Ordered Probit model constructed on the basis of the Probit link function in ordinal regression, the research findings of which are basically the same as those presented in the model of Table 6.2 with some differences in several aspects. “Employment status” ceases to be significant in the city sample model. And the results of “educational level” in the urban and rural samples are reversed compared with those presented in Table 6.2, and this variable no longer has a significant effect on the urban sample but on the rural sample instead. The log probability of higher subjective well-being of rural residents will increase by 2.3% for each level increase in “educational level”. In addition, the variable “personal gross income” has a very significant impact on the subjective well-being of rural samples. The log probability of higher subjective well-being of rural residents will increase by 6.6% as the income increases logarithmically one level, which does not show a significant effect in Table 6.2. It indicates that “income” is an important factor in improving the subjective wellbeing of rural residents, because the marginal utility of income in low-income groups is extremely large. Among the variables of prudential value, the variable “awareness of autonomy” bears significant statistical significance to the urban sample. The log probability of higher subjective well-being of urban residents will increase by 7.2%

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105

for each level increase in “awareness of autonomy”, which does not show a significant impact in the three models of Table 6.2. It shows that if people are more active in compliance with social norms as well as values and morals, it would be more conducive for them to attain inner happiness and satisfaction. Finally, the overall model firmly proves that urban residents have higher self-reported subjective wellbeing than rural residents, and the log probability of higher subjective well-being of urban residents is 22% higher than that of rural residents. Therefore, hypothesis 2 is basically falsified.

6.4 Discussion on the Subjective Well-Being of Urban and Rural Residents This chapter analyzes the “level of happiness” from a utilitarian perspective. According to the research, urban residents have higher self-reported subjective wellbeing than rural residents. The analysis based on controlling prudential value variables and socio-economic variables shows that urban residents still self-reported a higher level of subjective well-being than residents in rural areas. Therefore, the subjective well-being of urban residents is stronger than that of rural residents in general. In the study, variables in horizontal and vertical comparison both have a significant impact on the urban and rural samples, so it turns out to be false that “rural residents are happier because urban residents have stronger desires” in the previous research. Moreover, the view that “urban residents are happier because they have more advantages in occupying resources in various fields than rural residents” is based on the perspective of utilitarianism and cannot be generalized and then concluded. China’s society presents a typical status with an urban–rural dual structure. Urban residents boast good literacy education, job security, employment assistance, transportation and communication, medical care, welfare subsidies, social security and other public services provided by the government. However, rural residents have a strong desire for but have no access to them. The dual economic structure and the gap between urban and rural residents’ life have existed for a long period, which will inevitably influence the social cognition and evaluation capability of urban and rural residents. The cognition and evaluation are established on the sense of “relative deprivation”. At the early stage of reform and opening-up and modernization, people often made comparisons with the past, a phenomenon known as “vertical comparison”, and perceived a higher level of “happiness”. In the past ten years, as the gap between the rich and the poor has been widened and social demands have become more diversified, people began to compare with the people around them, which is called “horizontal comparison”, and the “level of happiness” perceived by people has diminished. Reasonable comparison of residents in the two different systems could not be made without controlling for these variables that affect most the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents.

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Among all the analytical models, the prudential value variables and the relative deprivation variables have the same significant impact on the urban and rural samples, which not only shows that the level of prudential cognition has an effect on the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents, but also reflects that the traditional culture of “not worrying about scarcity, but rather about uneven distribution” still bears its far-reaching influence in China. In recent years, the rural society has undergone unprecedented social changes, and an individual’s level of subjective well-being is determined by the vertical comparison between his/her past and future. That is to say, the marginal effect of welfare brought by social changes to rural areas and the social support in daily life determine whether rural people are happier. The urban society itself is in a relatively superior welfare system. The rapid urban changes and the information flow make them more willing to make horizontal comparisons with the surrounding people, and the comparison has become an important measure in determining their own happiness. Demographic variables such as age, income, marriage and other factors significantly affect the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents. In Model 1 and Model 4, other variables such as gender, political status, employment status, and family size cease to be statistically significant, which perhaps can be explained by other variables. By incorporating both urban and rural sample models, the study found that some variables differ between urban and rural areas. In Table 6.2, “educational level” shows a significant positive relationship in the urban sample, but not in the rural sample. In Table 6.3, “personal gross income” and “educational level” show a significant positive relationship in the rural sample, but not significant in the urban sample. In general, the results of the Ordered Probit regression are more consistent with the real situation. The reason is that based on the analysis from the perspective of prudential value, the improvement of educational level should have a negative effect or have no impact on urban residents due to an increase in dissatisfaction resulting from the improvement of educational level. In rural areas, an increase in income can enhance the marginal utility of rural residents and perform a distribution effect of narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor. A higher level of education can also help people gain more respect and social effects, thus increasing people’s subjective well-being. Among the socio-economic variables, “job satisfaction”, “evaluation of family’s socio-economic status”, “horizontal comparison of socio-economic status”, “vertical comparison of socio-economic status”, “closeness to relatives/friends”, “judgment of one’s current income” and other variables have significantly affected the subjective well-being of urban and rural residents. Individuals who feel more satisfied with their jobs, who feel their family’s socio-economic status has improved faster compared with their peer’s or their own status three years ago, who are more connected with relatives and friends, and who have a more reasonable perception of his/her current income, are more likely to feel happy. After organizing the relevant literature on subjective well-being over the past 30 years, Diener et al. (1999), came to the conclusion that the happy person is blessed with a positive temperament, tends to look on the bright side of things, and does not ruminate excessively about bad events, and is living in an economically developed society, has social confidants, and possesses

0.006

−0.048***

0.000***

0.042

0.480***

0.014***

Age

Square of age

Employment status (employment = 1)

Marital status (married = 1)

Educational level

0.009

0.000

Family size

Square of family size

0.161**

0.156**

0.277**

0.311**

0.259**

Job satisfaction

Evaluation of family’s socio-economic status

Horizontal comparison of socio-economic status

Vertical comparison of socio-economic status

Closeness to relatives/friends

Socio-economic variables

0.017

0.021

Personal gross income (logarithmic)

0.018

0.019

0.027

0.017

0.016

0.001

0.016

0.042

Political status (party member = 1) 0.050

0.004

0.040

0.035

0.000

0.026

−0.42

Gender (male = 1)

Control variable

0.231**

0.252**

0.303**

0.195**

0.149**

0.000

0.024

0.026

0.037

0.023

0.020

0.001

0.021

0.024

0.004

0.050

−0.006

0.005

0.049

0.041

0.000

0.007

0.034

0.060

0.007

0.485**

0.063

0.000**

−0.051**

−0.032

B

(SE)

Urban sample (model 5)

B

(SE)

Overall sample (model 4)

0.299***

0.386***

0.267***

0.108***

(continued)

0.027

0.030

0.041

0.026

0.025

0.002 0.177***

0.023 −0.001

0.024

0.078

0.006

0.016

0.066**

0.080

0.023***

0.071

0.093

0.474***

0.000

−0.015

0.009

0.043

(SE)

0.001***

−0.052***

−0.066

B

Rural sample (model 6)

Table 6.3 Ordered probit regression coefficients of various measures on differences in subjective well-being of urban and rural residents

6.4 Discussion on the Subjective Well-Being of Urban and Rural Residents 107

0.018 0.038

0.071**

Understanding

Urban and rural measures (urban = 0.220** 1)

9350.446*** 4781

3.945***

5.752***

184,125.499***

16,071.527***

8253

[Lifefeel-3]

[Lifefeel-4]

Chi-square

-2 Log likelihood

N

106,608.603***

4.933**

3.214***

0.325

0.322

0.320

0.322

0.024

0.023

0.018

0.034

0.029

0.016

(SE)

3472

6636.898***

77,469.534***

6.718*

4.750***

3.026***

1.860***

0.160***

−0.008

0.067***

−0.035

0.201***

0.016

B

0.344

0.336

0.331

0.333

0.028

0.044

0.018

0.032

0.035

0.019

(SE)

Rural sample (model 6)

Note The dependent variable of the model is “the self-assessment of overall feeling of your life” and the link function is Probit. B unstandardized regression coefficient, SE standard error +p < 0.10; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001

0.229

0.226

1.396**

2.179**

0.224

1.092*

[Lifefeel = 2]

0.362

0.001

0.008

0.105**

0.072*

0.131**

0.012

B

Urban sample (model 5)

[Lifefeel = 1] 0.225

0.020

Threshold

0.013

−0.001

Capability development

0.023

0.022

0.012

(SE)

Awareness of political participation 0.088**

Awareness of autonomy

0.013

0.155**

judgment of one’s current income

Prudential value variables

0.015

B

Overall sample (model 4)

Mutual assistance with neighbors/ residents in the same village

Table 6.3 (continued)

108 6 Research on Differences in Subjective Well-Being of Chinese Urban …

References

109

adequate resources for making progress toward valued goals. Happy people basically have a positive personality and are easy to see things. This also conforms to the results of our study. In the prudential value variables, “awareness of autonomy” and “awareness of political participation” both significantly affect the subjective well-being of urban residents, while “understanding” and “awareness of political participation” have a significant effect on the subjective well-being of rural residents. “Awareness of political participation” shows that people have a strong sense of responsibility to society and hope to achieve better improvement of the society by paying attention to current events or issues. This variable in effect reflects people’s attitudes toward life or their spiritual outlook, which is also demonstrated in the urban and rural samples. “Awareness of autonomy” has a significant impact on the urban sample but not on the rural sample, because urban residents have formed a rational cognition of maintaining public order, and their good life needs to be guaranteed by a good social system. A negative correlation is shown in the rural sample, indicating that rural people’s cognition of good life is still rooted in a set of established norms in the gemeinschaft, and the social cognition has not completely achieved the transition from the rule of rite in the agricultural society to the rule of law in the modern society. “Understanding” reflects social expectations and aspirations for a better future. If the lower class of a society is increasingly stereotyped, who lacks access and opportunities to change their own destiny and has difficulty in achieving a just, reasonable and open “upward” flow, the burden of the cost for the future may be unbearable. In recent years, the reform of the rural society in China has allowed residents in rural areas to get more opportunities and platforms to achieve “upward” mobility. This mentality of expectation makes people prone to subjective well-being, and it is also beneficial to the stability of the rural society.

References Cai, F., & Yang, T. (2000). Political economy of the income gap between urban and rural areas. Social Sciences in China, (04), 11–22+204. Diener, E., Suh, E. M., Lucas, R. E., & Smith, H. L. (1999). Subjective well-being: Three decades of progress. Psychological Bulletin, 125(2), 276–302. Ferrer-i-Carbonell, A., & Frjters, P. (2004). How important is methodology for the estimates of the eterminants of happiness. Economic Journal, 114(497), 641–659. Griffin, J. (1986). Well being: Its meaning, measurement and moral importance. Oxford University Press. Griffin, J. (1996). Value judgment: Improving our ethical beliefs. Clarendon Press. Huang, Q. C., & Mao, L. (2008, August 28). Rapid increase of chinese farmers’ income. People. Cn. Retrieved from http://www.people.com.cn/ Luo, C. L. (2006). Urban-rural separation, employment status, and well-being. China Economic Quarterly, (03). McCullagh, P., & Nelder, J. A. (1989). Generalized linear model (2nd ed.). Chapman and Hall. Peng, D. Y. (2005a, April 15). Life satisfaction index analysis of farmers (P. 7). Economic News.

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Qizilbash, M. (1997a). Needs, Incommensurability and Well-being. Review of Political Economy, 9(3), 261–276. Qizilbash, M. (1997b). Pluralism and well-being indices. World Development, 25(12), 2009–2026. Qizilbash, M. (1998). The concept of well-being. Economics and Philosophy, 14(1), 51–73. Tian, G. L. (2007). The criticism of the classical utilitarianism’s happiness teleology. The Northern Forum, (02). Wang, P. G. (2010).The structure of subjective well-being: diagnosis of the dual classification schema of affective and cognitive elements. Chinese Journal of Sociology, (04). Wang, P. G., & VanderWeele, J. T. (2011). Empirical research on factors related to the subjective well-being of Chinese urban residents. Social Indicators Research, 101(3), 447–459. Xing, Z. J. (2005a). Measuring happiness: Subjective well-being. People’s Publishing House. Zeng, H. C., & Yuan, Y. (2005). Residents’ quality of life report 2004. In X. Ru et al. (Eds.), Analysis and forecast on China’s social development. Social Sciences Academic Press.

Chapter 7

Research on the Influencing Mechanisms of Leisure Style on Quality of Life

Leisure is a yardstick of social civilization, the crystallization of human material and spiritual civilization, a brand new way of life and living state of people, and a field closely related to the quality of life of everyone (Goodale & Godbey, 2000: 1). In most societies, “people’s buoyant and healthy lifestyle involves a large part of leisure and recreation, and “appreciating nature and becoming involved in outdoor recreation was synonymous with promoting quality of life” (Marafa & Yung, 2004: 41). The best leisure style will enable individuals to achieve a good overall state and balance in physical, mental, emotional, intellectual, social, and spiritual aspects (Ettington et al., 2009: 14), thus achieving the purpose of improving people’s quality of life. As an important form of leisure activities, leisure affects people’s quality of life through social culture and social action. Based on this argument, this chapter will carry out empirical research and discussion on the relationship between leisure style and quality of life by referring to moderating variables such as occupational status.

7.1 Literature Review and Research of the Relationship Between Leisure Style and Quality of Life Through leisure activities, people can build social relationships, feel positive emotions and acquire additional skills and knowledge, thus improving their quality of life (Brajsa-Zganec et al., 2011). But this effect is different across different demographic characteristics (Diener et al., 1999; Iwasaki, 2007). Many studies on leisure activities of the elderly have proved that leisure activities can effectively improve their quality of life (Lawton, 1994; Mobily et al., 1993; Riddick & Stewart, 1994). The effect is also different in different cultures. In Singapore, for example, parks provide a “backdrop” for public life, bringing family and friends together for various cultural festivals and events. These activities have implications for promoting quality of life (Iwasaki, 2007; Yuen, 1996). © Social Sciences Academic Press 2023 P. Wang, Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2221-5_7

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In research on leisure styles, some researchers have classified leisure styles into different domains as person-centered and place-centered (Lloyd & Auld, 2001). Place-centered leisure mainly emphasizes on the leisure activity itself and its frequency, while person-centered leisure aims to understand the awareness of and attitude towards participating in leisure activities. They argue that the value of leisure activities depends not only on the frequency of participation, but also on the attitudes and state of mind of the participants. Nimrod and Adoni (2006), in their study of the impact of leisure styles on quality of life of older adults in Israel, based on whether it was a formally-organized cultural activity and its location, identified four types of leisure activities: company seekers, media consumers, culture enthusiasts, and sophisticated choosers. Leisure activities for youths aged 12–18 years were classified into three types in the study of Passmore and French (2001): typologyachievement, social, and time-out leisure-together. Three leisure parameters were also suggested: enjoyment, freedom of choice, and frequency of participation. In the follow-up study by Scott and Willits (1989), the leisure participation of 2,086 sophomores in rural Pennsylvania high schools surveyed in 1947 was reexamined. They classified leisure activities into four types: socializing activities, creative or artistic activities, intellectual activities, and sport activities. There is no consensus among researchers regarding the classification of leisure styles, but the vast majority of studies conducted tend to classify leisure activities into three or four types by means of principal component analysis or cluster analysis, and the “place-centered” classification method was adopted. For different researchers, there are different research approaches to the influencing mechanisms of leisure styles on quality of life (e.g., Brajsa-zganec et al., 2011; Lloyd & Auld, 2001; Møller, 1992; Nimrod & Adoni, 2006). Russell (1990) found in the path analysis of 137 older people over the age of 60 that leisure participation affects quality of life through leisure satisfaction, and leisure satisfaction was considered to be the only factor affecting quality of life. Rodriguez et al. (2008) predicted the relationship between leisure and life satisfaction through the framework of activity theory and need theory in order to further study their relationship. The study confirmed the validity of both theoretical perspectives, but stronger relationships were found between satisfied needs than with participated activities. All of the above are cross-sectional studies. Wendel-Vos et al. (2004) also introduced the research method of analyzing longitudinal data in order to have a better understanding of the relationship between leisure activities and health-related quality of life. The study found that the relationship between changes in leisure activity and changes in health-related quality of life remains unclear. Cross-sectional associations were mainly found for physical components of health-related quality of life, whereas longitudinal associations were predominantly observed for mental components of health. As Iwasaki (2007) said, there still should be a lack of a clear and systematic understanding of how leisure activities improve quality of life, so more research was needed to prove it. Leisure as a symbol of social class is fully displayed in Veblen’s work The Theory of the Leisure Class. He argued that a clear tendency of conspicuous expenditure, whether of goods, services or human life, is to “effectually [maintain]… the

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consumer’s good fame, and it must be an expenditure of superfluities.” (Veblen, 1899: 96). To some degree, almost all forms of leisure represent conscious behavior for participants: consumers choose leisure goods and services with an intention to associate them with the social status and image they want to express. This symbolic nature of leisure becomes a form of people’s “pursuit of ostentation, luxury, enjoyment and extravagance” (Juniu, 2000: 70) (Edginton & DeGraaf, 2009: 39). Since people’s choice of leisure lifestyle is affected by identity, it is inevitable to result in a situation where different social classes choose activities suitable for their classes. For example, the leisure styles of ordinary urban people are generally watching TV, chatting, shopping, playing mahjong or chess, reading newspapers, etc. Urban white-collar workers prefer to drink coffee, go to bookstores, listen to music, travel and enjoy cuisine (Liu, 2008: 54). Shinew et al. (1996) conducted a study on African Americans and found that men and women of higher social class share the same leisure activities, while men and women of lower social class pursue different leisure activities. There has been a lot of relevant research in sociology on leisure style and occupational status. The studies of White (1955), Clarke (1956), and Burdge (1969) all found that differences in social status or professional background would lead to different choices of leisure style. Moreover, with the rise of people’s occupational status, the types of leisure activities people participate in also increase. The study of MacDonald et al. (1949) also proved through facts that children’s leisure participation is to prepare for their upward mobility in the future. However, with the increasing improvement of people’s living standards, the consumption and experience of leisure styles also show a flattening trend. In other words, regular and vulgar leisure activities such as sports and fitness, cultural entertainment, shopping and consumption, dressing and makeup, tasting tea or wine will gradually become an important channel for destratification. Veblen (1964: 54–56) pointed out that leisure and conspicuous consumption, as means to win fame and construct identity and status, have different effects in different social forms. Zhang and Fang (2005: 234) contended that modern leisure consumption follows a kind of logic that status can be changed through goods, and that it is a kind of salvation to realize upward mobility through their own efforts. In fact, everyone has a yearning for social status in his heart, a yearning for noble birth and social status. In the case of the inability to inherit the social status from the blood, the consumer society provides an alternative force to satisfy people’s yearning mind, that is, the abundance and possession of goods. It can be said that the leisure lifestyle has gradually become the “salvation” of people’s stratification in today’s society. Then, in this case, how do leisure style and occupational status affect the quality of life of Chinese people? How does occupational status affect Chinese people’s quality of life through leisure? This chapter will make use of large-scale social survey data obtained in China to explore the impact of leisure style and occupational status on Chinese people’s quality of life.

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7.2 Data and Research Methods of Leisure Style and Quality of Life (1) Data source The data used in this chapter are the Chinese General Social Survey (2006) conducted by the Department of Sociology of Renmin University of China and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2006. This survey adopted the four-stage unequal probability sampling method, covering urban and rural areas in 28 provinces, autonomous regions and cities (excludes Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Tibet). The effective sample size was 10,151, and the age structure of urban samples ranged from 17 to 69 years old. There were 6,013 urban samples, accounting for 59.2% of the total; and 4,138 rural samples, accounting for 40.8% of the total. (2) Introduction of variables The dependent variables studied in this chapter mainly include “material life satisfaction” factor variable, “social interaction satisfaction” factor variable, and “overall life satisfaction” variable. In CGSS 2006, there was a question to design the subjective quality of life in the scale—“In general, are you satisfied with the following aspects of life?” In this chapter, principal component analysis is used to extract the factors of this scale, and after Varimax rotation, two factors were extracted and named as “material life satisfaction” and “social interaction satisfaction” respectively (see Table 7.1). Riddick (1985) found that health and other problems would hinder people’s participation in leisure activities, thus affecting their life satisfaction. Therefore, this chapter regards “personal health status” as an important indicator of leisure participation, and these indicators are named together as the “social interaction satisfaction” factor. The KMO value here is 0.757, and the Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity reaches a statistical significance, indicating that there are common factors among the correlation matrices representing the whole population, which is suitable for factor analysis. In addition, the overall life satisfaction is the result of the overall evaluation of all kinds of satisfaction. 67.3% of the residents are satisfied with their lives and 32.2% are not, which is quite consistent with our previous studies (Wang & VanderWeele, 2011). The independent variables studied in this chapter mainly include control variables, leisure style variables, occupational status variables, and the interaction variables between leisure style and occupational status. Control variables are those that are frequently selected in relevant studies, mainly including gender (Henderson, 1990; Wang & VanderWeele, 2011), age, educational level, annual income, employment status (Eckersley, 1999; Wang & VanderWeele, 2011), marital status (Mookherjee, 1992). The leisure style variable is made up of a set of scales, asking “How often do you engage in the following activities in your spare time?” Specific leisure activities are selected according to relevant literature and the characteristics of Chinese leisure culture. In this chapter, principal component analysis and Varimax rotation method are used to extract four leisure factors. According to the frequency distribution of different variables, they are named as “culture expenditure and going out”, “active

7.2 Data and Research Methods of Leisure Style and Quality of Life Table 7.1 The Varimax rotated factor matrix for quality of life

115

Material life satisfaction

Social interaction satisfaction

Housing situation

0.770

0.132

Residential community

0.727

0.132

Job

0.723

0.147

Family economic status

0.719

0.147

Interpersonal relationship

0.123

0.821

Family relationship

0.065

0.817

Personal health status

0.271

0.578

Note Extraction method: Principal component analysis. Rotation method: Varimax

socializing”, “Family and Home Activities” and “working business”. The KMO value here is 0.862, indicating that there are many common factors among variables, which is suitable for factor analysis. Bartletts spherical test reached the statistical significance, indicating that there is correlation between these variables, and the correlation matrix is also suitable for factor analysis. The four leisure activity factors extracted here are similar to relevant studies. For example, the “cultural expenditure and going out” factor share significant similarity with the “culture enthusiasts” proposed by Nimrod and Adoni (2006) and “visiting cultural events” proposed by (Brajsa-Zganec et al., 2011); the “active socializing” factor shares significant similarity with “active socializing and going out” proposed by (Brajsa-Zganec et al., 2011) and “socially focused” proposed by Chiriboga and Pierce (1993); the “family and home activities” factor has a high degree of similarity with the “family and home activities” proposed by Brajsa-Zganec et al., (2011), and the “working business” factor has a high degree of similarity with the “company seekers” proposed by Nimrod and Adoni (2006) (Table 7.2). This study measures occupational status with the ISEI (International SocioEconomic Index) value of the corresponding occupations. The ISEI is a coding system that measures occupational status. In this system, all occupations are assigned certain scores with respect to their earning power (Granzeboom & Treiman, 1996), and the theoretical value ranges from 0 to 100. The advantage of using ISEI to measure occupational status lies in that it comprehensively considers a variety of occupational characteristics including power, prestige, education and other factors (Feng,

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Table 7.2 The frequency of residents’ activities in their leisure time Principal component structure

Leisure activity

Browsing the internet

High frequency

Middle frequency

Low frequency

Lack of leisure

Culture expenditure and going out

Active socializing

Family and home activities

Working business

0.782

0.121

−0.344

0.175

Read literature or non-fiction

0.777

0.114

−0.002

0.103

Chatting or playing games online

0.719

0.141

−0.388

0.127

Reading newspapers or magazines

0.697

0.205

0.201

−0.045

Listen to music or opera

0.679

0.102

0.106

0.061

Working out or participating in physical exercise

0.660

0.158

0.180

−0.254

Going out

0.554

0.466

−0.045

−0.047

Dining out

0.516

0.502

−0.013

0.125

Going to the teahouse

0.187

0.774

−0.084

0.149

Going to a cafe or bar

0.285

0.718

−0.210

0.162

Playing cards or mahjong

0.006

0.689

0.262

−0.162 −0.106

Watching TV

0.132

0.078

0.636

Doing chores

−0.113

−0.159

0.602

0.364

0.104

0.142

0.019

0.862

Dealing with employment-related issues

Note Extraction method: Principal component analysis. Rotation method: Varimax

2006). This variable in this chapter examines the ISEI value of the respondent’s current/last off-farm occupation. (3) Models and research strategy The statistical analysis models used in this chapter mainly include multiple linear regression model and binary logistic regression model. In the regression analysis of the factor score coefficients of “material life satisfaction” and “social interaction satisfaction”, multiple linear regression model was adopted. The construction of multiple linear regression model is to find the linear equation between dependent variable (represented by Y) and independent variable (represented by X, whereas K is the number of independent variables). The statistical model is as follows: Y = β0 + β1 X1 + β2 X2 + β3 X3 + . . . + βk Xk + ε

7.3 Empirical Analysis and Findings on the Relationship Between Leisure …

117

In the equation, β0 is the constant term. β1, β2, β3, …, βk is the partial regression coefficient. βi (i = 1, 2, …, k) refers to the average change of Y (“material life satisfaction” or “social interaction satisfaction”) for each unit change in the independent variable Xi under the condition that other independent variables remain unchanged. ε is random error, also known as residual, which means that the change of Y cannot be explained by the independent variable Xi (i = 1, 2, …, k). In the binary logistic regression model, “in general, whether you are satisfied with the current living conditions” is taken as the dependent variable, “very satisfied” and “relatively satisfied” in the answer are assigned as “1”, and “not very satisfied” and “very dissatisfied” are assigned as “0”. The model is as follows:  ln

  pi = β0 + β1 X1 + β2 X2 + β3 X3 + · · · + β1 βk−j + βk Xk 1 − pi

Pi is the probability of overall life satisfaction and 1 − Pi is the probability of subjective dissatisfaction. X1 − Xk are the control variables, leisure style variables and occupational status variables that affect the overall life satisfaction. βi βk−j is the interactive variable of occupational status and leisure style, β0 − βk are the constant term and variable coefficient.

7.3 Empirical Analysis and Findings on the Relationship Between Leisure Style and Quality of Life To better present the influencing mechanisms of leisure style and occupational status on quality of life, six models are established in Table 7.3 to analyze the influence of each variable on “material life satisfaction” and “social interaction satisfaction” respectively. The benchmark model 1 shows that all the demographic variables have a significant impact on material life satisfaction. The regression analysis of “material life satisfaction” and “social interaction satisfaction” with the control variables of gender, age, educational level, employment status, personal annual income, and marital status reveals that their explanatory power is only 6.2%. For women, selfreported material satisfaction is 8% lower than for men. The relationship between age and material life satisfaction manifests itself as a U-shaped curve, with an inflection point at the age of 42. In other words, the material life satisfaction will gradually decrease as age increases, and shows an upward trend after 42 years old. There is an increase of 0.031 units in material life satisfaction for every unit increase in educational level. Self-reported material satisfaction is 36% higher for employed people than for those of other types of work, and the material life satisfaction increases by 46% for every unit increase in annual income. Married people’s material life satisfaction is 21% higher than those of other marriage types.

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Table 7.3 Multiple linear regression model of each variable on the sub-domain satisfaction factors Independent variables

Material life satisfaction as the dependent variable

Social interaction satisfaction as the dependent variable

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

Model 4

Model 5

Model 6

B (SE)

B (SE)

B (SE)

B (SE)

B (SE)

B (SE)

Constants

−0.742** (0.222)

−0.520** (0.224)

−0.673** (0.227)

0.540* (0.230)

0.524* (0.232)

0.503* (0.236)

Gender (Male = 1)

−0.087** (0.028)

−0.081** (0.029)

−0.080** (0.029)

0.082** (0.029)

0.110*** (0.030)

0.110*** (0.030)

Age

−0.069*** −0.064*** −0.062*** −0.037*** −0.037*** −0.037*** (0.008) (0.009) (0.009) (0.009) (0.009) (0.009)

Age squared/ 100

0.086*** (0.009)

0.081*** (0.009)

0.078*** (0.009)

0.030** (0.010)

0.029** (0.010)

0.029** (0.010)

Education level 0.031*** (0.006)

0.010 (0.007)

−0.004 (0.007)

0.017** (0.006)

0.010 (0.007)

0.012 (0.008)

Work status (employed = 1)

0.308*** (0.037)

0.296*** (0.039)

0.286*** (0.039)

0.034 (0.038)

0.059 (0.041)

0.061 (0.041)

Personal annual income (logarithmic)

0.376*** (0.037)

0.299*** (0.038)

0.284*** (0.038)

0.032 (0.038)

0.043 (0.040)

0.046 (0.040)

Marital status (Married = 1)

0.194*** (0.041)

0.222*** (0.041)

0.218*** (0.041)

0.269*** (0.042)

0.257*** (0.043)

0.253*** (0.043)

Cultural spending and going out

0.109*** (0.018)

0.088+ (0.051)

0.041* (0.019)

0.058 (0.053)

Active participation in social activities

0.070*** (0.012)

0.083+ (0.043)

−0.042** (0.013)

−0.081+ (0.045)

Family and home activities

−0.002 (0.015)

0.000** (0.049)

0.049** (0.016)

0.133* (0.051)

Business affairs

0.025 (0.015)

0.030 (0.047)

−0.014 (0.016)

0.010 (0.049)

Occupational ISEI

0.006*** (0.001)

1.82E−005 (0.001)

Occupational ISEI × cultural spending and going out

0.000 (0.001)

0.000 (0.001)

Occupational ISEI × active participation in social activities

0.000 (0.001)

0.001 (0.001)

(continued)

7.3 Empirical Analysis and Findings on the Relationship Between Leisure …

119

Table 7.3 (continued) Independent variables

Material life satisfaction as the dependent variable

Social interaction satisfaction as the dependent variable

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

Model 4

Model 5

Model 6

B (SE)

B (SE)

B (SE)

B (SE)

B (SE)

B (SE)

Occupational ISEI × family and home activities

0.000 (0.001)

−0.002+ (0.001)

Occupational ISEI × business affairs

0.000 (0.001)

– 0.001 (0.001)

R Square (%)

6.2

7.4

8

2.2

2.8

2.9

N

5046

5046

5042

5046

5046

5042

Note B is the unstandardized regression coefficient and (SE) is the standard error. +p < 0.10; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001

Leisure style variables are added to model 2 based on the benchmark model 1, which leads to 1.2% increase of the model’s explanatory power. Except for the “educational level” variable, all other control variables remain significant. The model indicates that when people have more opportunities to enjoy leisure activities, their material life satisfaction will be higher. The material life satisfaction increases by 0.109 units and 0.07 units respectively for each unit increase in “cultural spending and going out” and “active participation in social activities”. “Family and home activities” and “business affairs” have fewer leisure traits and therefore they hardly have a significant impact on material life satisfaction. Occupational status and interaction items of leisure style and occupational status are included in model 3, and the model’s explanatory power increased to 8%. But those interaction items do not significantly influence material life satisfaction, that is, the choice of leisure style by people with different social status is not statistically significant on material life satisfaction. Occupational ISEI has a significant effect on material life satisfaction, and the material life satisfaction increases by 0.006 units for each unit increase in occupational ISEI. The influence of “family and home activities” becomes highly significant, but the correlation intensity is very weak, suggesting that the influence of “cultural spending and going out” and “active participation in social activities” on material life satisfaction may be reflected through occupational status. Influencing factors of “social interaction satisfaction” are discussed from model 4 to model 6. The benchmark model 4 shows that control variables such as gender, age, educational level, and marital status all have a significant impact on social interaction satisfaction. Different from previous literature, men’s self-reported social interaction satisfaction is higher than that of women, which is consistent with the law of gender expectations in social interaction. The relationship between age and social interaction satisfaction also manifests a U-shaped curve, but the turning point is around the age of 61. Riddick (1985) also found in a national sampling research

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that leisure activities is the most important factor influencing life satisfaction of people aged 65 and over. When people at higher educational level, they tend to have higher social interaction satisfaction. “Work” and “income” do not have a significant impact on social interaction satisfaction, which proves the saying that “happiness is not measured by money”. Married people’s social interaction satisfaction is 3% higher than that of those of other marriage types. Leisure style variables were added to model 5 based on the benchmark model 4. “Cultural spending and going out” and “family and home activities” have a positive significant impact on social interaction satisfaction, and the social interaction satisfaction increases by 0.041 units and 0.049 units respectively for each unit increase in their frequency. Active participation in social activities (extracted from “going to teahouses”, “going to cafes or bars”, and “playing cards or mahjong”) has a negative significant impact on social interaction satisfaction. In other words, the social interaction satisfaction decreases by 0.042 for each unit increase in “active participation in social activities”. The negative relationship reflects that participating in these activities makes people’s mental world worse, because it is meant to kill time or to divert boredom. “Business affairs” is not statistically significant on social interaction satisfaction because it is essentially distant from leisure and entertainment. Model 6 incorporates occupational ISEI and interaction items of leisure style and occupational ISEI, and the study found that occupational ISEI could not have a significant effect on social interaction satisfaction. As occupational ISEI increases, people’s choice of leisure mode (watching TV and doing housework) will significantly reduce their social interaction satisfaction. In model 6, “family and home activities” has a positive effect on social interaction satisfaction, indicating that leisure and entertainment can indeed enable people to enjoy life and achieve spiritual satisfaction, but it is closely related to occupational status. The improvement of occupational status significantly weakens this leisure and entertainment function and further reduces or even eliminates its influence on social interaction satisfaction. The effects of each variable on the “overall life satisfaction” were analyzed by the four models in Table 7.4. The benchmark model 7 presents the effect of control variables, and variables such as gender, age, educational level, work status, personal annual income, and marital status all have a significant impact on overall life satisfaction. Among them, the log probability of men’s overall life satisfaction is 16% lower than that of women’s. The relationship between age and the overall life satisfaction presents a U-shaped curve, with a turning point around the age of 42. The overall life satisfaction increases by 0.093 units for each unit increase in educational level. The log probability of employed people’s overall life satisfaction is 81.1% higher than that of those of other work types. The overall life satisfaction increases by 0.698 units as the personal annual income increases logarithmically one unit. Taking other marriage types as the reference, the log probability of married people’s overall life satisfaction is 64% higher. Leisure style variables were added to model 8. Both “cultural spending and going out” and “active participation in social activities” have a positive significant effect on the overall life satisfaction. In other words, the log probability of overall life satisfaction increases by 17.3% and 7% respectively for each unit increase in them.

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Table 7.4 Binary logistic regression model of each variable on overall life satisfaction Model 7

Model 8

B

EXP (B)

B

Model 9 EXP (B)

B

Model 10 EXP (B)

B

EXP (B)

(Constant)

−0.433

0.648 −0.151

0.860 −0.0.373

0.689 −0.998

2.713

Gender (Male = 1)

−0.181**

0.835 −0.148*

0.862 −0.146*

0.865 −0.128

0.880

Age

−0.143*** 0.867 −0.138*** 0.872 −0.137*** 0.872 −0.068*

0.934

Age squared / 100

0.170*** 1.185

0.165*** 1.179

0.163*** 1.177

0.085** 1.088

Education level

0.093*** 1.097

0.062*** 1.064

0.043*

0.069** 1.071

Work status (employed = 1)

0.594*** 1.811

0.595*** 1.813

0.582*** 1.790

0.284*

1.328

Personal annual income (logarithmic)

0.698*** 2.009

0.615*** 1.850

0.604*** 1.829

0.246*

1.279

Marital status (Married = 1)

0.495*** 1.640

0.513*** 1.671

0.517*** 1.676

0.176

1.193

Cultural spending and going out

0.160*** 1.173

0.167

1.181

0.087

1.091

Active participation in social activities

0.068*

1.070

0.213*

1.237

0.138

1.148

Family and home activities

0.048

1.049

0.117

1.125

0.017

1.017

Business affairs

0.032

1.032 −0.056

0.946 −0.128

0.880

1.044

Occupational ISEI

0.009**

1.009 −0.001

0.999

Occupational ISEI × cultural spending and going out

0.000

1.000 −0.002

0.998

(continued)

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Table 7.4 (continued) Model 7

Model 8 EXP (B)

B

Model 9 EXP (B)

Model 10

B

EXP (B)

Occupational ISEI × active participation in social activities

−0.003

0.997 −0.004

0.996

Occupational ISEI × family and home activities

−0.002

0.998 −0.001

0.999

Occupational ISEI × business affairs

0.002

1.002

1.002

B

B

EXP (B)

0.002

Material life satisfaction

2.166** 0.8724*

Social interaction satisfaction

0.923** 0.2516*

– 2 Log likelihood

6798.818

6774.739

6752.229

3633.544

Cox and Snell R Square (%)

5.4

5.8

6.0

39.5

N

5776

5776

5769

5042

Note B is the unstandardized regression coefficient and EXP (B) is the log probability. +p < 0.10; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001

Model 9 incorporates occupational ISEI and interaction items of occupational ISEI and leisure style on the basis of model 8. It is found that occupational ISEI has a significant impact on the overall life satisfaction, and the overall life satisfaction increases by 0.009 units for each unit increase in occupational ISEI. There is no interaction between occupational ISEI and leisure style variables, indicating that occupational status cannot influence individuals’ overall life satisfaction through differences in leisure style. Model 10 incorporates “material life satisfaction” and “social interaction satisfaction” on the basis of model 9, and the explanatory power of the whole model suddenly increases to 39.5%, and gender, marital status, leisure style, and the interaction items of leisure style and occupational ISEI become no longer significant. This indicates that the explanatory power of “material life satisfaction” and “social interaction satisfaction” is very strong, which largely explains the cease of the variables mentioned above and increases the explanatory power of the whole model. In particular, the overall life satisfaction increases by 8.724 times and the

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spiritual life satisfaction increases by 2.516 times for each unit increase in material life satisfaction. This fully illustrates that these two aspects are the key to people’s overall life satisfaction, and the influence of material life satisfaction is higher than that of social interaction satisfaction.

7.4 Discussion on the Relationship Between Leisure Style and Quality of Life It is hoped that this chapter may illustrate how different leisure styles influence the quality of life through massive sample data; more importantly, and how individuals with different social status improve their quality of life by participating in different leisure activities. It is found that the influence of demographic sociological variables on life satisfaction is basically similar to previous studies. The influence of leisure style and occupational status on quality of life is more complex and it is difficult to give a definite answer. However, there are four basic affirmative conclusions. First, material life satisfaction and social interaction satisfaction are the most important factors influencing the overall life satisfaction, which can explain 33.5% of the variance of dependent variables. Among them, material life satisfaction has the greatest influence, which indicates that economic factors are still the key to the satisfaction of Chinese urban and rural residents. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the per capita gross income of urban households in 2010 was 21,033 yuan and the per capita net income of rural residents was 5,919 yuan, which is less than USD 3,000 per capita on average. Therefore, economic factors are directly related to the quality of life. It has been found that after per capita income exceeds USD 3,000, there would be no correlation between economic factors and quality of life (Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2002). Second, leisure styles can be roughly classified into four categories in China, including “cultural spending and going out”, “active participation in social activities”, “family and home activities”, and “business affairs”, and the specific content included in each category is similar to previous studies. Among them, life satisfaction can be divided into two categories after factor analysis: material life satisfaction and social interaction satisfaction. It is found that the mechanism of leisure activities influencing the quality of life varies with the life satisfaction at different levels. In previous research, the quality of life can be basically understood from two aspects, that is, affective measures, including both positive and negative affections; and cognitive measures, which can be called life satisfaction (Diener & Emmons, 1984). The relationship between affective measures and leisure activities has been rarely seen in the previous literature, and researchers have mainly studied the relationship between life satisfaction or the quality of life and leisure activities, because cognitive measures oriented life satisfaction reflects relatively stable and long-lasting attitudes and intentions (Campbell, 1981).

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Third, generally speaking, the more leisure activities are used as a means to improve social status or as a mechanism to enjoy life, the higher the material life satisfaction will be. Although the interaction effect between occupational status and leisure activities is not reflected, information in model 2 and model 3 reveals that the influence of “cultural spending and going out” and “active participation in social activities” on material life satisfaction cannot be separated from the influence of occupational status. In the analysis of “social interaction satisfaction”, all three types of leisure activities, including “cultural spending and going out”, “active participation in social activities”, and “family and home activities”, have a significant impact on social interaction satisfaction. This indicates that leisure activities are regarded as a social culture and an action-oriented meaning, which strongly contribute to people’s feelings and perceptions. However, the various leisure activities named after the medium-frequency leisure style tend to be used to exhume emotions or kill time, and thus rendering a kind of negative influence. The mechanism by which occupational status influences social interaction satisfaction through the effect of lowfrequency leisure activities is that leisure activities such as watching TV or doing housework will significantly reduce social interaction satisfaction as occupational status increases. With the rise of occupational status, people need to maintain a corresponding frequency and level of leisure activities to maintain social segregation and self-identification. Fourth, social interaction satisfaction cannot be achieved through a good job or a high salary because it is obtained through perceptual understanding and judgment of the meaning of life and cultural identification. Life satisfaction will increase as occupational status improves, and it does not affect life satisfaction through leisure style. However, social interaction satisfaction is an exception, because it can significantly increase with status rising at the expense of routine leisure styles such as doing housework and watching TV. Leisure consumption is more focused on the improvement of people’s life style; economic status is not an absolute factor in achieving leisure consumption; and education of leisure enables people to reflect on their state of being alienated by materials (Liu, 2008, p. 161). “Family and home activities” and “business affairs” basically have no significant impact on quality of life, indicating that outdoor leisure resources that can increase the leisure opportunities for the residents need to be improved to enhance people’s quality of life. It also indicates that Chinese residents have reached a critical value in terms of indoor leisure resources and leisure opportunities. According to Herzberg’s (1968) theory of needs, once some needs are satisfied, other corresponding needs will be vigorously pursued by people. This chapter has its own limitations. First, this chapter discusses the impact of the “site-oriented” leisure style variables on quality of life like many other studies. Model 10 already shows that the “people-oriented” leisure style variables are the most important variables influencing the quality of life. Generally speaking, the subjective variables or “people-oriented” variables would reflect the information of the objective variables in analysis. Lloyd and Auld (2001) also found that the “peopleoriented” leisure style variables were the best indicators to predict the quality of life. Moreover, they found that those who frequently participated in social activities

References

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and those who were able to derive more psychological benefits from leisure had higher quality of life. Therefore, both “site-oriented” and “people-oriented” leisure activities can be considered in future studies. Second, factor analysis was employed to classify leisure activities in this chapter as in previous studies, but the psychological experience behind the frequency of participation failed to be presented in the analysis. Therefore, it is difficult to reflect the relationship between the classification system of leisure activities and the quality of life because there are specific psychological needs behind different leisure activities (Tinsley & Eldredge, 1995). Third, contrary to the top-down research approach advocated by the current literature, this chapter adopts a bottom-up approach, which fails to demonstrate the influence of changes in individuals’ environment around on quality of life. It would be of great significance to study the relationship between leisure activities and the quality of life in different societies or groups in future researches (Nimrod & Adoni, 2006). If longitudinal tracking research method can be adopted to explore the relationship between changes in leisure activities and changes in quality of life, it will be more scientific to reflect which leisure activities are more conducive to improving people’s quality of life. Given the short follow-up period of related studies (WendelVos et al., 2004), the author suggests that the interval should be extended in future research, and the effect of intervention factors can be better illustrated if relevant intervention approaches are adopted.

References Brajsa-Zganec, A., Marina, M., & Iva, S. (2011). Quality of life and leisure activities: How do leisure activities contribute to subjective well-being? Social Indicators Research, 102(1), 81–91. Burdge, R. J. (1969). Levels of occupational prestige and leisure activity. Journal of Leisure Research, 1(3), 262–274. Campbell, A. (1981). The sense of well-being in America: Recent and trends. McGraw-Hill. Chiriboga, D. A., & Pierce, R. C. (1993). Changing Contexts of Activity. In J. R. Kelly (Ed.), Activity and aging: Staying involved in later life (pp. 42–59). Sage. Clarke, A. C. (1956). The use of leisure and its relation to levels of occupational prestige. American Sociological Review, 21(3), 301–307. Diener, E., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2002). Will money increase subjective well-being? A literature review and guide to needed research. Social Indicators Research, 57(2), 119–169. Diener, E., & Emmons, R. A. (1984). The independence of positive and negative affect. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 47(5), 1105–1117. Diener, E., Suh, E. M., Lucas, R. E., & Smith, H. L. (1999). Subjective well-being: Three decades of progress. Psychological Bulletin, 125(2), 276–302. Eckersley, R. (1999). Quality of life in Australia: An analysis of public perceptions. Discussion Paper Number 23 (The Australia Institute Ltd., Lyneham, ACT). Edginton, C., & DeGraaf, D. (2009). Leisure and life satisfaction: Foundational perspectives (Du, Y. Trans). Economic Press. Feng, S. Z. (2006). Unit division and collective resistance. Sociological Studies, (03). Goodale, T., & Godbey, G. (2000). The evolution of leisure: Historical and philosophical perspectives (Cheng, S. M. Trans.). Yunnan People’s Publishing House.

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Granzeboom, H. B. G., & Treiman, J. D. (1996). Internationally comparable measures of occupational status for the 1988 international standard classification of occupations. Social Science Research, 25, 201–239. Herzberg, F. (1968). One more time: How do you motivate employees. Harvard Business Review, 1–2, 53–62. Henderson, K. (1990). The meaning of leisure for women: An integrative review of the research. Journal of Leisure Research, 22(3), 228–243. Iwasaki, Y. (2007). Leisure and quality of life in an international and multicultural context: What are major pathways linking leisure to quality of life? Social Indicators Research, 82(2), 233–264. Juniu. (2000). The impact of immigration: Leisure experience in the lives of South American immigrants. Journal of Leisure Research, 32(3), 358–381. Lawton, M. P. (1994). Personality and affective correlates of leisure activity participation by older people. Journal of Leisure Research, 26(2), 138–157. Liu, H. C. (2008). Life and leisure education. People’s Publishing House. Lloyd, K. M., & Auld, C. J. (2001). The role of leisure in determining quality of life: Issues of content and measurement. Social Indicators Research, 57(1), 43–71. MacDonald, M., McGuire, C., & Havighurst, R. J. (1949). Leisure activities and the socioeconomic status of children. American Journal of Sociology, 54(6), 505–519. Marafa, L. M., & Yung, F. (2004). Changes in participation in leisure and outdoor recreation activities among Hong Kong people during the SARS outbreak. World Leisure Journal, 46(2), 38–47. Mobily, K. E., Lemke, J. H., Ostiguy, L. J., Woodard, R. J., Griffee, T. J., & Pickens, C. C. (1993). Leisure repertoire in the sample of mid-western elderly: The case for exercise. Journal of Leisure Research, 25(1), 84–99. Møller, V. (1992). Spare time use and perceived well-being among Black South African youth. Social Indicators Research, 26(4), 309–351. Mookherjee, H. (1992). Perceptions of well-being by metropolitan and nonmetropolitan populations in the United States. The Journal of Social Psychology, 132(4), 513–524. Nimrod, G., & Adoni, H. (2006). Leisure-style and life satisfaction among recent retirees in Israel. Aging & Society, 26(4), 607–630. Passmore, A., & French, D. (2001). Development and administration of a measure to assess adolescents’ participation in leisure activities. Adolescence, 36(141), 67–75. Riddick, C. (1985). Life satisfaction determinants of older males and females. Leisure Sciences, 7(1), 47–63. Riddick, C., & Stewart, D. G. (1994). An examination of the life satisfaction and importance of leisure in the lives of older female retirees: A comparison of blacks to whites. Journal of Leisure Research, 26(1), 75–87. Russell, R. (1990). Recreation and quality of life in old age: A causal analysis. The Journal of Applied Gerontology, 9(1), 77–90. Shinew, K. J., Floyd, M. F., McGuire, F. A., & Noe, F. P. (1996). Class polarization and leisure activity preferences of African Americans: Intragroup comparison. Journal of Leisure Research, 28(4), 219–232. Tinsley, H. E. A., & Eldredge, B. D. (1995). Psychological benefits of leisure participation: A taxonomy of leisure activities based on their need—gratifying properties. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 42(2), 123–132. Veblen, T. (1899). The theory of the leisure class. B. W. Heubsch. Veblen, T. (1964). The theory of the leisure class: An economic study of institutions. The Commercial Press. Wang, P. G., & VanderWeele, J. T. (2011). Empirical research on factors related to the subjective well-being of Chinese urban residents. Social Indicators Research, 101(3), 447–459. Wendel-Vos, G. C. W., Schuit, A. J., Tijhuis, M. A. R., & Kromhout, D. (2004). Leisure time physical activity and health-related quality of life: Cross-sectional and longitudinal associations. Quality of Life Research, 13(3), 667–677.

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Chapter 8

A Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Social Change and Happiness

8.1 Foreword Modern research of happiness started from the research review of subjective happiness written by Warner Wilson in 1967 (Wilson, 1967). Happiness generally refers to people’s overall evaluation of their quality of life based on internal standards (Shin & Johnson, 1978). It generally refers to the comprehensive or partial cognition in three domains: social, psychological and physical. In today’s society, with the improvement of material life, subjective well-being is becoming an important indicator of people’s living standards and social development. However, in recent years, many studies suggested that the rapid growth of material life had not been translated into residents’ happiness. It is for this reason that happiness once again becomes a hot topic in all walks of life. From a theoretical perspective, the research on happiness in the temporal dimension has always been concerned by scholars, among which the longitudinal changes of happiness in the macro context have been the focus of academic research in recent years, and there are many relevant studies (Liu et al., 2012; Wu, 2016; Veenhoven & Hagerty, 2006; Easterlin, 2009; Inglehart et al., 2008; Li & Raine, 2014), most of which concentrated on the explanation of diachronic change from the perspective of macro social structure change. However, only a few longitudinal studies concerned and clarified the developmental pattern of happiness under the Age-Period-Cohort model (Li & Fan, 2016; Yang, 2008; Tang, 2014). There is a problem of mixture of three temporal dimensions (age, period, and cohort) in other studies. The cohort effect involves the influence of the living environment on the growth trajectory of individuals, and different times have different life situations, so their happiness is also different. Therefore, the cohort analysis has value in both statistics and research topics. In addition, structural factors cannot be ignored in longitudinal causal analyses, and it is also important to examine the influence of specific social structures on happiness embedded in the changes of age, period, and cohort. In the case of China, urban and rural structural factors have a fundamental structural impact on

© Social Sciences Academic Press 2023 P. Wang, Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2221-5_8

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many issues, so it is necessary to place their impact on happiness in the context of historical change.

8.2 Literature Review of the Changing Patterns of Happiness (1) The developmental pattern of happiness under the Age-Period-Cohort model Age, period, and cohort, as three temporal dimensions, independently affect the level of individual happiness and its changes at different levels (Yang, 2008). In early studies of happiness, age was somewhat negatively correlated with happiness and the older the age, the lower the happiness (Wilson, 1967). However, with the progress of the research, a growing body of research evidence posed contrary arguments. It is believed that the relationship between happiness and age is not significant, and there is either a positive correlation or a u-shaped relationship, that is, happiness will first decline with age, and then increase. The selection effect of longevity plays a key role, that is, older people are originally optimistic and have positive self-evaluations (Danner et al., 2001; Yang, 2008); In addition, the increased social participation of the elderly is also an important reason for the increase in happiness (Diener, 1984). In view of the controversial definition of happiness, Angus Campbell argued that the elements of happiness had different manifestations and intensities in different age groups, with young people experiencing more positive emotions and the elderly showing better overall happiness (Campbell, 1976). It can be concluded that different research designs will result in different research conclusions. Period and cohort effects are exogenous temporal dimension effects, and their effects on happiness are similar to the mechanisms of living environment. Individuals in the same period or cohort with similar living environment will have similar feelings of happiness (Yang, 2008). In the existing studies on period changes in happiness, researchers have mostly adopted social comparison theory and transition theory to elucidate the laws. Comparison theory suggests that with the development of social economy, the reference standards of happiness will also improve, and the level of happiness depends mainly on the person with whom it is compared (Tang, 2014); for example, based on their own before-and-after comparisons, individuals who experienced difficult life circumstances in their early years may feel happier because of their improved quality of life today (Yang & Lee, 2009). Transformation theory suggests that the structural transformation of a country’s society will have fundamental effects on income distribution, labor market, etc. (Zhou, 2000). Transformation theory has good explanatory power in explaining the changing patterns of national happiness in transforming countries, which suggests that transforming countries generally experience social disorder in the early stage of transformation, such as a sudden increase in unemployment and ideological instability (Brockmann et al., 2009), and these factors will have a detrimental effect on happiness. As the

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transformation deepens and order stabilizes, the new system will gradually play a positive role, the damage effect will gradually disappear, and the happiness of the population will increase faster than before (Easterlin, 2009). One possible reason for the inconsistent research results on the age and period effects of happiness is the neglect of cohort effect. Cohort effect refers to the influence of some experiences prior to the survey point on the current state, which involves the time period before the survey point, which poses some challenge for researchers to analyze in depth. Studies on the cohort effect are usually based on the assumption that an individual’s experiences in childhood or certain life stages, including the social system and culture, social stability, living standards and other development stages at that time, will have an impact on their subsequent life and value shaping (Yang, 2008). Due to the limitations of data and statistical methods, there are few cohort researches on happiness. Only Yang Yang, Zhilin Tang and Li Ting have conducted standardized cohort effect analysis on happiness of residents in the United States and China. Yang pointed out that the cohort effect of American residents’ happiness remained generally stable, but the baby boom would cause some loss of happiness. The differences in happiness of American residents by gender, race, and education would decrease with age, and the gender and race differences in happiness also kept decreasing with period changes, that is, there is a temporal aggregation effect rather than a cumulative effect (Yang, 2008). Tang, Li Ting and other scholars believed that the cohort effect of Chinese residents’ happiness was not significant, and Tang believed that this reflected the adaptability unique to the Chinese society and Chinese people (Tang, 2014). However, the study of Li Ting focused on analyzing the effect of the number of children born on their parents’ happiness without paying special attention to the pure cohort effect (Li & Fan, 2016). Therefore, the cohort effect of Chinese residents’ happiness and the moderating effects of other factors need to be further studied. (2) Empirical study on the characteristics of happiness changes of Chinese residents during the transformation period Contemporary China is in the midst of a profound societal transformation, and longitudinal studies of happiness are carried out around “Easterlin Paradox”.1 Internationally, Hilke Brockmann et al. conducted a study of Chinese residents from 1990 to 2000 and concluded that despite high socioeconomic growth, the happiness of Chinese residents declined during the decade of the 1990s, and used this to reject the “Easterlin paradox”. It was also pointed out that relative economic deprivation and social dislocation were important factors affecting happiness (Brockmann et al., 2009). In contrast, Easterlin’s study on the happiness of Chinese residents in the last 20 years found that the happiness of Chinese residents did decline from 1990 to 2000, but then rebounded (Easterlin et al., 2012), thus the “Easterlin paradox” still applies in China. In addition, Tang also highlighted the impact of income inequality and marketization brought by reform and opening up on happiness, arguing that 1

The “Easterlin Paradox”, proposed by economist Easterlin, argues that the relationship between happiness and economic growth or income is an inverted U-shaped one, rather than a linear one.

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the negative impact of income inequality would continue to diminish with social development, while factors such as marketization brought by reform would promote happiness (Tang, 2014). In terms of longitudinal research on happiness in China, Liu Junqiang et al. analyzed the CGSS data from 2003 to 2010, and found that the happiness of Chinese residents was on the rise from 2003 to 2010 (Liu et al., 2012), but they did not consider the dimension of cohort, nor were the socio-demographic variables analyzed as fixed effects. Therefore, the research results were only based on a two-dimensional analysis (impact variable-happiness), instead of a three-dimensional analysis (impact variable-happiness-temporal dimension). By analyzing the WVS data from 1990 to 2012, Li Peilin et al. pointed out that there was a decreasing trend for the happiness of Chinese residents due to the increasing gap between the rich and the poor in the market-oriented reform and the impact of the initial integration of values, but with the increasing social concern about income equity and livelihood issues, the happiness of residents showed an increasing trend after 2000 (Li et al., 2015: 224). Wu Fei verified the applicability of the “Easterlin paradox” in China using CGSS 2003–2013 data, and concluded that the income effect would have a positive impact on happiness in cross-sectional data, but could not produce a significant effect in longitudinal analysis (Wu, 2016), thus arguing the validity of the “Easterlin paradox”. A research breakthrough in the cohort effect of happiness was achieved by Li Ting et al., who also used CGSS 2003–2013 data, they found that the effect of the number of children on happiness would change over the course of life (Li & Fan, 2016), which fully illustrated that macro factors could achieve differentiation of the happiness effect on parents of different birth cohorts by shaping different life courses. Most of the above domestic and foreign studies on the change trend of happiness focused on analyzing the social structural factors behind the change from a macro perspective. However, first of all, there are few studies from the perspective of specific factors in different social situations, and there in general lacks analysis that combines macro and micro factors. Second, most longitudinal studies are limited to the environmental factors that can be drawn from data coverage under existing temporal and spatial aspect and rarely consider the independent impact of social environment on cohort changes. Finally, the household registration factor finds its marginal place in longitudinal studies involving cohort, and such placement is obviously inappropriate for the understanding of the happiness of Chinese residents. Therefore, based on the reality of China, this chapter tries to analyze the life cycle and life course of Chinese residents’ happiness, and further discusses the role of structural factors such as the household registration system in it.

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8.3 Research Design and Research Method (1) Data source The data used in this chapter are quoted from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) from 2003 to 2013, including data from eight surveys in 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. Chinese General Social Survey is a large-scale social survey project organized by the National Survey Research Center at Renmin University of China. Since 2003, Probability proportional to size (PPS) sampling method has been adopted. A sample survey would be conducted annually or every other year in about 125 counties (districts), 500 subdistricts (townships and towns), 1,000 residential (village) committees and about 10,000 households. CGSS surveys cover a wide range of contents. In addition to general demographic characteristics, it also includes family information, occupation, lifestyle, social networks, political participation, and social cognition. In this chapter, the effective sample size of the analysis is 68,338, so it is more reliable in determining the causal association. (2) Variable preprocessing In this chapter, gender, age, age squared, household registration, political status, marital status, educational level and work status are selected as the individual-level independent variables of the analytical model. The survey point in time (period) and birth cohort (cohort) are selected as the contextual independent variables of the analytical model. Happiness is selected as the dependent variable. (3) Research method and design The growth environment of an individual has a great influence on his subsequent life situation and value perceptions (Wang, 2007: 7). Therefore, it is crucial to estimate the effects of the social environment that may have influenced the individual’s past development history. However, the three temporal dimensions involved are perfectly linear: Period = Age + Cohort, thus leading to difficulties in identification. Hierarchical age-period-cohort-cross-classified random effects models (HAPC-CCREM) put the APC model into different levels, Thus, internal nesting of data is generated (Yang & Land, 2006). The data from the eight CGSS cross-sectional surveys from 2003 to 2013 are independent from each other, and each individual is nested in different period and cohort at the same time, thus forming two independent crossclassification units of “period” and “cohort” at level 2. This construction of the model basically solves the linear dependence among the three dimensions (Yang & Land, 2013: 199). Therefore, based on CGSS data from 2003 to 2013, this chapter uses HAPC-CCREM to estimate the effects of age, period and cohort on happiness of Chinese residents. Age and other demographic characteristic variables is set as level 1 variables, period and cohort as level 2 variables, and the model is constructed as follows:

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Level 1 model (fixed effects model): H appinessi jk = α0 jk +

n    βi jk × xi jk + ei jk i

Level 2 model (random intercepts and random coefficients model): α0jk = π0 + p0j + c0k βijk = πi + pij + cik Among them, Happinessijk is the dependent variable happiness; βijk is the estimated coefficient of each variable; xijk is the independent variable in the fixed effects model; eijk is the residual of the individual effect, that is, the part that cannot be explained by the model; α0jk is the intercept, including the period random effect intercept p0j , the cohort random effect intercept c0k , and the mean effect (intercept) π0 that control the control period and cohort effects, the former two of which are normally distributed: p0j ~ N(0, τoj ) and cok ~ N(0, τ0k ); and πi represents the average effect of the variables included in random effects on residents’ happiness after controlling the period and cohort effects, pij is the period effect coefficient in the random model, and cik is the cohort in the random model. The effect coefficients are also normally distributed: pij ~ N(0, τij ) and cik ~ N(0, τik ).

8.4 Laws of Change and the Influencing Mechanisms of Chinese Residents’ Happiness With the HAPC-CCREM model, more accurate estimates of age, period, and birth cohort effects can be obtained and the trend of which can be analyzed deeply. Meanwhile in order to make the intercept meaningful, centralized preprocessing of the independent variables is also conducted. Model 1 only considers age, period, and birth cohort effect; Model 2 incorporates other covariables on the basis of Model 1, including gender, household registration, political status, marital status, education level, and working status; Model 3 adds some interaction terms between covariables and age. Models 4 and 5 add stochastic effects of household and job on the basis of the previous model. It has been found that women, Party members, the married, the employed, and individuals at higher educational levels reported higher level of happiness. Considering the fundamental influence of the household registration system on modern Chinese society, it has been further found that work status is an important measure influencing the difference in happiness between urban and rural residents: when the variable of “employed” is added, the influence of the household registration on happiness is not significant, while once it is removed, the happiness of rural residents is significantly higher than that of urban residents. Through model 4 and model 5, it can be concluded that the

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household registration system has a profound impact on Chinese residents’ happiness in social changes. (1) The general trend of age, period and birth cohort of Chinese residents’ happiness It can be seen from model 1 that the overall presentation of the age effect is a Ushaped distribution, with the lowest point of the life cycle of happiness at the age of 53, and the highest point in the youth group. From the perspective of the period effect, people’s happiness continues to rise from 2003 to 2011, and then declines to a certain extent after 2011, which is basically consistent with the findings of previous research. In terms of the birth cohort effect, the predicted happiness of people born before the 1930 cohort slightly decreases, and then rises and remains at a high level in the 1930–1950 cohorts, followed by a decline and a trough in the 1955–1970 cohorts period. After that, there is a slight upward trend and maintains at a stable level in the 1975–1990 cohorts, and the happiness of the 1990 cohort also shows a downward trend. In other words, comparing with the happiness of the generation born in the early period of reform and opening up, there was no obvious growth trend before. (2) Population difference in the age trend of happiness Most of the existing studies have only pointed out the correlation between population characteristics and happiness, but rarely further analyzed how the influence of these measures on happiness changed in different life cycles. It has been proved that the moderating role of age is crucial, and the effects of measures like gender and educational level on happiness play different roles in different life cycles. Based on model 5, the population difference on the age effect of Chinese residents’ happiness can be found out (Fig. 8.1). In terms of the interaction between the gender effect and the household registration effect, it can be seen from Fig. 8.2a that the difference in happiness is mainly reflected in gender, and household registration has almost no influence. Women’s happiness is higher than that of men, and this difference is relatively stable. In the middle stage of life, the difference in happiness of the household registration effect begins to emerge, and gradually increases. Urban residents’ happiness is clearly higher than that of rural residents, but rural women’s happiness is always higher than urban men until the later period of life when it shows a downward trend, and gradually converges with urban men’s happiness. Therefore, the difference in happiness of the gender effect and the household registration effect gradually expands with age, and the cumulative advantage in happiness of urban household registration and men’s gender gradually increases with age. The difference in happiness between Party members and non-Party members reflects the unequal opportunity under China’s unique “dual-track system” (Zhang & Jia, 2016). It can be concluded from Fig. 8.2b that there is a certain disparity in happiness between Party members and non-Party members when one becomes a Party member, that is, Party members themselves are happier than non-Party members, but the difference is subtle. With the increase of age, the accumulation of political capital

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Fig. 8.1 Age, period, and birth cohort effects of Chinese residents’ happiness: CGSS 2003–2013

8.4 Laws of Change and the Influencing Mechanisms of Chinese Residents’ …

Fig. 8.2 Population characteristics of factors influencing happiness in different life cycles

137

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8 A Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Social Change …

and opportunities brought by Party membership would gradually widen this gap. Comparing the married with the unmarried/divorced, the happiness of the former is much higher than that of the latter before the age of 60, while after that, the gap between the two begins to converge. The age effect of education on happiness is obvious in Fig. 8.2c. Residents’ happiness gradually increases as their educational level advances, but this trend changes with the life cycle. Especially after the middle age, the difference in happiness among people at different educational levels gradually narrows with age. In particular, the difference in happiness among people with primary school education, junior high school education, and senior high school education almost disappear in their old age, which indicates that the differentiation of happiness in educational level can be neutralized by age. The labor market, as an important human resource, gradually presents three levels of education, which are the uneducated, people with middle and lower education, and people of higher education. In other words, higher education is the watershed between ordinary manual workers and those in white collar and above, and people’s education background largely determines their work types, which is an important reason for the difference in happiness. (3) The role of household registration effect in period and birth cohort effects of happiness Population characteristics not only interact with the age effect, but also moderate the period and birth cohort effects. The difference of population characteristics of Chinese residents’ happiness period and birth cohort effects can be found out through model 5. From the perspective of situational theory, the nature of household registration is significant in the random effect model because it is directly related to China’s unique social structure. It can be seen from Table 8.1 that urban household registration can strongly promote people’s happiness, but from Figs. 8.3 and 8.4, we can see that it does not play the same promoting role in all periods and birth cohorts. From the perspective of the period effect, urban residents’ happiness is higher than that of rural residents from 2003 to 2010, and the two are almost the same in 2012, but rural residents’ happiness is higher than that of urban residents in 2011 and 2013. Moreover, it can also be seen from the trend from 2008 to 2010 that the growth rate of urban residents’ happiness drops sharply, which may be caused by the different perceptions of urban and rural residents on the financial crisis at that time. From the perspective of birth cohort effect, the changes in people’s happiness have generally gone through three stages: the happiness of the generation born in wartime continues to increase, and the happiness of the generation born in the early period of the founding of New China to the “Cultural Revolution” continues to decline until the beginning of the reform and opening up. After that, the happiness of the next generation improves slightly. The overall trend reflects the social changes of China in the past century. Only among the generation born in the second period, the happiness of rural residents is generally higher than that of urban residents, and the happiness of urban residents is significantly higher than that of rural residents in other periods. Among them, in the aspect of educational level, the negative influence of political movements in the

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139

Table 8.1 HAPC-CCREM model of Chinese residents’ happiness: CGSS 2003 ~ 2013 Fixed effects Intercept Age Age squared Women Rural household registration

Model 1 3.5836 *** −0.0030*** 0.0002***

Model 2 3.4861***

Model 3 3.4679***

Model 4 3.4863***

Model 5 3.4603***

Model 6 3.4852**

−0.0040*** −0.0047*** −0.0039*** −0.0050*** −0.0047** 0.0005*** 0.0890*** −0.0026

0.0005*** 0.0873*** 0.0021

0.0005*** 0.0921*** −0.0223

0.0005*** 0.0889*** −0.0251

0.0005*** 0.0733*** 0.0235**

Party member

0.1370***

0.1315***

0.1362***

0.1302***

0.1361***

Married

0.3223***

0.3369**

0.3249***

0.3380***

0.3395***

Educational level (reference: illiterate/semi-literate) Primary school

0.1093***

0.1298**

0.1089***

0.1409***

0.1276***

Junior high school

0.2158***

0.2466**

0.2224***

0.2615***

0.2423***

Senior high school

0.2781***

0.3065**

0.2792***

0.3200***

0.3062***

Junior college or above

0.3931***

0.4128**

0.3803***

0.4182***

0.4220***

0.0010*

0.0012**

Age X women Age X rural household registration

0.0012** −0.0008

−0.0017

−0.0001

Age X Party member

0.0037***

Age X married

−0.0017***

−0.0022*** −0.0018***

Age X primary school

−0.0003

−0.0017+

Age X junior high school

−0.0035***

−0.0051*** −0.0037***

Age X senior high school

−0.0056***

−0.0064*** −0.0058***

0.0032***

0.0034***

−0.0004

(continued)

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Table 8.1 (continued) Fixed effects

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

Model 4

−0.0072**

Age X junior college or above Employed

0.0855***

0.0833**

0.0612*

Model 5

Model 6

−0.0077**

−0.0072***

0.0619*

Random effect—variance components Period effect Intercept

0.0510*

0.0571*

0.0575*

Household registration effect

0.0566*

0.0578*

0.0028+

0.0028+

0.0046*

0.0089+

0.0047*

0.0059*

0.0570*

Birth cohort effect Intercept

0.0011*

0.0074*

0.0102*

Household registration effect Job effect Individual effect

0.6918***

0.6646**

0.6635**

0.0093*

0.0085*

0.6617***

0.6606**

0.0065+

0.6647**

Fit index AIC

168,877

166,215

166,207

165,993

165,986

166,311

BIC

168,877

166,215

166,207

165,981

165,974

166,311

Note ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05, + p < 0.1

“Cultural Revolution” period on the urban birth cohort in the 1940s and 1950s cannot be ignored.

8.5 Conclusions and Discussions Based on the 8 CGSS surveys from 2003 to 2013, this chapter focuses on the age, duration and birth cohort effects of Chinese residents’ happiness by using THE HAPC-CCREM method, and compares the changes of different groups in these three time dimensions. This chapter confirms the significance of the birth cohort effect in the analysis of Chinese residents’ happiness, and verifies the key role of the household registration system in the life cycle changes of residents’ happiness. The age effect obtained in this chapter is basically consistent with the previous research. The U-shaped distribution of age shows that the physiological stages and social pressures of different life cycles have a certain impact on people’s happiness. As the barometer of social attitudes, people’s happiness is largely influenced

8.5 Conclusions and Discussions

141

Fig. 8.3 The importance and influence of the household registration effect in the period effect

Fig. 8.4 The importance and influence of the household registration effect in the generation effect

by events happened at different life stages. Generally speaking, the youth group is moving from school to society, and the society’s expectations for their growth and the diversified competition for their self-development make their happiness gradually decline. Although middle-aged people may have stable careers and incomes, they also have to bear higher working pressure and life strains as the family pillar. In addition, the selection effect and social comparison effect can largely explain the phenomenon that older people are happier (Conceição & Bandura, 2013). The effect of economic integration on marriage, the human capital (economic capital) represented by educational level, and the political capital represented by Party membership all have a significant impact on people’s happiness (Huang, 2013, 2016). Additionally, urban household registration is manifested as a kind of comprehensive capital, making people happier to have urban household registration than the

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8 A Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Social Change …

rural one, but the trends of these groups in different life cycles are quite different. Cumulative effect theory and age-neutralizing effect theory provide a better explanation for life cycle changes (Ferraro & Kelley-Moore, 2003). The capital accumulation effect gradually emerges as age increases, followed by happiness’ convergence or differentiation. In terms of gender, the cumulative effect of social expectations and social pressure is reflected by the increased difference in happiness between men and women. Although men are more likely to have the capital mentioned above than women, the cumulative effect of social pressures related to men’s identity and role in China makes them less happy than women. Moreover, there is no sign that the gender gap in happiness is gradually narrowing as women’s market participation increases. In fact, economic integration and human capital largely belong to economic guarantee, while political capital belongs to system guarantee. Although they may both have cumulative advantage effects with age, the diminishing marginal utility in wealth accumulation becomes more obvious (Diener, 1984). Therefore, the happiness of people with different political status representing political capital tends to expand with age, while the happiness of groups with different marital status and education levels tends to converge with age. Work status serves as an agent to some extent in the process of household registration influencing residents’ happiness, and the well-being advantage of urban residents largely comes from their more guaranteed jobs. The concept of job between urban and rural residents is different. In cities, a job basically means a relatively fixed source of income and a certain degree of occupational competitiveness, while in rural areas, the representative work, farming, has low occupational competitiveness, but its income level is far lower than that of jobs in urban areas. Obviously, the security of economic life brought by the former is higher than that of the latter. In fact, the sharp increase in the floating population in China in recent years has caused some people of rural household registration to change their work types to non-agricultural ones, and some of them may have two types of work. In other words, they have land income in the countryside and work income in the city, which means that they have double security, and this may lead to the phenomenon that rural residents are happier because of mixed job types. However, there will be some major changes in the rural land system with the advancement of urbanization, and most migrant workers will eventually leave their land, which will lead to a fundamental change in the type of work. The ambiguity caused by the reform of the household registration system may eventually make the difference gradually disappear. In terms of the overall period effect, the results in this research have both similarities and differences with the existing studies. The result of people’s happiness from 2003 to 2010 is basically consistent with other studies, that is, it continues to rise in this period (Liu et al., 2012), but declines from 2011 to 2013 after reaching its peak in 2011. Regarding the low level of people’s happiness at the beginning of the twenty-first century, some researchers attribute it to the intensified social competition brought by the expansion of university enrollment (Huang, 2016). It seems that the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 did not have a significant negative impact on people’s happiness, but it can be seen from the trend of different household registration groups that the growth of urban residents’ happiness suddenly slowed down

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143

after 2008, which is largely due to the increase in urban unemployment brought by the crisis and the challenges posed to the employed, as well as a series of recessions it had caused. In the post-crisis era (after 2008), the potential impact of the financial crisis gradually emerged, such as the competition between the re-employment of the unemployed and the normal employment of the youth, which resulted in a decrease in people’s happiness in the post-crisis era to a certain extent. Variations in the happiness cohort effect are determined by social events experienced by individuals during specific life stages. The 1930–1950 cohorts experienced the transition from war to peace, and thus cherish the peaceful environment more after the founding of New China, so their happiness continues to increase and maintains a high level, while the educational opportunities of the 1955–1970 cohorts were affected by the “Cultural Revolution”, and thus their happiness declines. The overall happiness of the 1975–1995 cohorts remains at a stable level, that is, the happiness of the generation born in the early period of reform and opening up does not show a particularly significant increase compared with that before. As a profound social transformation, reform and opening up is a process of rebirth of social structure and continuous adjustment of interest structure, with a series of conflicts and psychological anxiety factors, while happiness is the result of social order acting on the individual level (Huang, 2016). Therefore, the positive effect of the transformation may emerge in the mid to late period of the reform. The urban household registration is essentially an indicator of guarantee index, so people of urban household registration are generally happier. In the period effect, the happiness of rural residents in the post-crisis era exceeds that of urban residents, largely because the employment competition caused by the crisis mainly happened in cities, and it was less competitive for the rural occupation (farming). Generally speaking, the indirect negative situational impact brought by the crisis is aimed at the whole population, and the sheltering effect of a specific household registration is ineffective. Therefore, it can be seen that the happiness of the whole population declines. In the birth cohort effect, the different happiness among people of different household registration also projects the social situation at that time. Although the reform first started in the countryside, the introduction of the market system in the early stage of reform and opening up actually had a greater direct impact on the cities, and it is clear that cities were easier and faster to adapt to this new market system than the countryside. This chapter focuses on the analysis of problems from a macroscopic or mesoscopic perspective, and figures out the predicted values and the trend of the three time dimension effects from a social and historical perspective, and thus inevitably it cannot consider some inherently important microscopic elements, as well as some hot topics such as “Easterlin Paradox”. Although these topics are important, a detailed discussion of such issues is clearly beyond the scope of this chapter. Additionally, HAPC-CCREM is a newly developed measurement tool, and its estimation reliability and validity are still controversial (Cao & Ye, 2014). Therefore, the results need to be treated with caution.

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Chapter 9

Critical Dimensions and Future Prospects of Research on Quality of Life

9.1 Reflection and Enlightment: Critical Dimensions of the Research on Quality of Life In the process of studying the quality of life from the perspective of social change, there are still quite a few puzzling issues, as how to rationally view the relationship between social change and quality of life, between quality of life and quantity of life, and between economic development and subjective evaluation. To clarify these problems is of great significance for the further study of people’s quality of life. (1) A rational view of the relationship between social change and quality of life When thinking about the relationship between social change and quality of life, people will first associate it with Rostow’s model of five stages of development. In his book “The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto” (1960), Rostow divided economic development into five stages based on the investigation of economic history and empirical statistics: the traditional society, the preconditions for take-off, the take-off, the drive to maturity, and the age of high mass-consumption. The sixth stage of development—the search for quality, was proposed later in Politics and the Stages of Growth. In the search for quality stage, people emphasize consumption, life experience and personality, so the sector represented by the service industry becomes the leading sector of the society. In other words, human society no longer evaluates the degree of social development in terms of material output, but instead evaluates the quality of life in terms of labor forms, environmental conditions and self-realization. At present, different countries and regions are at different stages of development, and even in the same country there are differences in development between different regions, so it is inevitable that there exist different requirements for the quality of life. Therefore, people’s judgment on their own quality of life and the society’s judgment on quality of life for different individuals can only be interpreted from the perspective of respecting development stage, history and culture, and different life expectations. The existence of different stages of development © Social Sciences Academic Press 2023 P. Wang, Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2221-5_9

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means that not every society must go through each stage, and that different stages of development are allowed to coexist within the same society. As the economic society is always evolving and developing, and the values and cultures of different nations and countries vary greatly, people’s understanding of the concept of quality of life will also change with the changes of the times. In terms of the calculation method of quality of life indicators, two problems will be involved: one is that the basis of measurement method is not only related to individual needs, but also related to resources; the second is whether the level of personal welfare should be evaluated by oneself or by others, and what indicators should be included and how to evaluate. These different problems constitute the fundamental difference in the structure of the above indicators. Therefore, when we choose and construct the quality of life structure with Chinese characteristics, we should keep pace with the times, try to adapt to the needs of economic and social development and change, and choose the indicators of public concern and focus; for one thing, both subjective and objective indicators should be brought into the scope of investigation. For another, the compatibility, comparability and commonality of the indicator system of the international community should also be considered. This will not only serve the research of the Chinese society well, but also facilitate international exchanges and cooperation, helping understand the focus of development at different stages and the gap between China and the international community. In December 2014, the National Institute of Social Development (CASS) released the Annual Report on Social Development in China (2014), pointing out that in 2014, the life satisfaction of urban residents were 62.83 points, and for the first time people’s dissatisfaction with psychological and spiritual life exceeded that of material and economic life, suggesting that China was developing towards meeting people’s livelihood needs in spiritual culture, mental health and other areas of life (Lin, 2015). This report pointed out the shift in people’s search for quality of life under the drastic change of social environment in China. But how do we treat the problem of measuring quality of life with objective scores? Is it the higher the score, the better the quality of life? On a scale of one hundred percent, is our quality of life progressing? The author believes that if the objective material life can be simply measured through quantitative comparison by using scores, then when the search for quality of life reaches the level of spiritual life, it must be the search for the satisfaction and realization of freedom, autonomy, independence, understanding, capability and other contents. If we must quantify the quality of life at the spiritual level, then this stage must be a normal distribution of values in the population. Therefore, the state where there is no absolute high score is the optimal state of this society, when the society is in a stable and normal distribution of scores, we may not be far from the good society that we have been longing for. So can the impact of social change be adequately reflected by analyzing the trends in quality of life? Again, the answer is no. Our previous sections have analyzed health-related quality of life, well-being, and satisfaction from multiple perspectives through the age-period- cohort model, and what can be drawn is that in order to gain a deeper understanding of social changes in quality of life, in addition to analyzing period effects, differences across age groups and differences in quality of life across

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cohorts in future studies should also be fully considered, so as to understand more thoroughly the connotations of each indicator of quality of life, which means that the need to reduce statistical bias. Of course, the author believes that for the future research on quality of life in China, there is also the urgent need to establish a database for tracking studies, so that the net effect of social change can be better separated while controlling individual, social, and other confounding factors. Currently, there are foreign studies that have applied the hierarchical age-period-cohort model to conduct dynamic analysis on changes in quality of life through the construction of repeated cross-sectional data, but similar refined studies are still lacking in China, which is an area that needs to be focused on in our future research. (2) A rational view of the relationship between the quality of life and the quantity of life Quality of life is an umbrella term that is composed of two complex words, “life” and “quality”. Life, according to the Macquarie Dictionary, is the condition which distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic objects and dead organisms…or course or mode of existence; And “quality” includes two meanings: one is a characteristic, property or attribute, and the other is “high grade; superior” (Rapley, 2003). “Life” has many levels and aspects, and the so-called “quality” even contains both “nature” and “value”. Therefore, quality of life should at least refer to both “the nature of life” and “the value of life” (Cheng, 1984). Quality of life as a concept at the group or society level has generally been studied under two approaches, namely the “Scandinavian approach” and the “American approach”. The former focuses on the study of living standards in Scandinavian, while the latter emphasizes people’s subjective well-being in America. The difference between these two models lies in their understanding of quality of life, welfare and especially the “good society”. The disparity, according to He and Zhou (2002), is as follows: the Scandinavian approach to living standards is based on the definition of welfare as “the individual’s disposal of resources”. This resource-centered view of welfare focuses on the ability to meet people’s needs, and accordingly, the various indicators in this conceptual framework are chosen around objective living conditions. The American approach to quality of life, on the other hand, define welfare in terms of the satisfaction of needs, namely, welfare is ultimately evaluated by individuals themselves. The difference between the above two perspectives is essentially the concrete embodiment of “quantity of life” and “quality of life”. One emphasizes living conditions while the other emphasizes individual life feelings. There are both associations and distinctions between the two. The association is discussed first. Quality of life is based on quantity of life, the latter of which is a higher-level pursuit of spiritual realm. If we blindly pursue quantity of life, we will become the slave of life and become alienated people, thus losing the essence of life. The quality of life is not only a true pursuit of life, but more preciously, it contains a theoretical orientation of yearning for a better life. If we do not have a complete set of theories to explain the basis of measurement and evaluation, to explain the relationship between facts and value, and to describe the “quantitative” quality of life, then it is difficult to derive a correct and credible conclusion on value. Different societies, cultures and races all have

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their own judgment of ideal life, which contains an intrinsic pursuit of value. Therefore, it is possible to establish the corresponding social indicator system through this framework, so as to better understand the evaluation of people’s quality of life. The exact connotation of the measurement of “hard indicators” (population size, wage and income, housing area, life expectancy, etc.) can then be better understood. So how to understand the difference between “quantity” and “quality” of life? It was found by many studies that the correlation between the two is very weak when the two are analyzed. Why is this the case? First, research has found that when the per capita income is below USD 3,000, “quantity” prioritizes “quality”, and the two are closely related. When the per capita income is above USD 3,000, “quantity” and “quality” will be moderately separated, and people will pay more attention to the expectation of “quality”. Second, generally in studies, the quantity of life research reflects on a macro level measurement and evaluation, and the quality of life research focuses on a questionnaire with the individual as a unit. There are too many mediating and moderating variables in the transmission from macro to micro, so it is understandable that the statistical correlation is not strong. Third, under the condition that quantity of life is given, people’s judgment on the quality of life will vary from person to person, from time to time, and from place to place. Therefore, subjective evaluation may not reflect the true objective level. Therefore, in research, special attention should be paid to the joint analysis of the quantity and quality of life, especially to the concrete analysis of the flow of social events that affect the relationship between the two. Only in this way, the scarcity, narrowness and rigidity of the concept of quality of life can be avoided, and the connotation measurement of quality of life can be richer and more vivid. (3) A rational view of the relationship between economic development and subjective evaluation The economic development of a society mainly refers to the implementation and planning of production, distribution and consumption by the doctrine of “full development of men’s abilities; full exploitation of earth’s resources; full use of material instruments; and unhampered flow of commerce”. Confucianism holds that economic development can also improve people’s material life so as to achieve the Confucian ideals of humanistic education and rule under the ritual and musical system. In other words, economic growth and income increase are an important factor of social progress and a basic element of human development. Confucius answered Ran You’s question (also known as Ran Qiu, a leading disciple of Confucius), “Once they are rich, what should be added to that?” He said, “Teach them.” Mencius contended that “When they (people) have a constant livelihood, they will have constant minds, but when they lack constant livelihood, they will lack constant minds”. The pursuit of peace and prosperity is not only to satisfy the people with peace and prosperity, but also to further implement humanistic education, so that everyone can embrace benevolence and justice and achieve the kingly way of the politics. Obviously, the ultimate goal of increasing monetary income and material consumption is also to improve the quality of life.

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By the 1960s, countries of the Third World on the whole had reached the annual GNP growth target of 5% proposed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) (Shen, 2006). However, this development model, which takes economic development as the first or only criterion, casts a shadow on social development, leading to ecological environment deterioration, global climate change, frequent natural disasters, increasing social contradictions and widening gap between the rich and the poor. Behind the growth and prosperity, there are crises lurking everywhere. While people have devoted a lot of labor to social development, they cannot afford the high house prices and medical fees. They have not even had the time to enjoy the various conveniences brought by modern society through economic development, some of which have come at the expense of people’s health. Pan (2003) believed that material consumption and the basic contents of various quality of life are the basic rights and interests of human social groups and biological individuals, which should be respected and guaranteed. In Europe, as he illustrated, earning extra income by increasing working hours is considered a form of abnormal competition, which is illegal and subject to financial penalties if found. Moreover, Additional income is also taxed in a progressive tax system. As we continue to promote social development and social construction, although we do not need to restrict people from contributing extra labor, the government and all sectors of society need to work hard in building a social security system for the lowest class, creating a situation where ordinary people can share the fruits of development in the process of promoting economic and social development, and guiding the upper class on how to keep giving back to society and promote the formation of positive energy in society while obtaining the rightful value. Economic growth refers to the continuous exploitation of resources, the continuous improvement of productivity, the continuous expansion of markets, and the continuous prosperity of industrial and commercial enterprises. The opposite of economic growth is economic recession or depression, decline in production, market stagnation, contraction or stagnation of industry and commerce. Economic stability refers to a stable rate of change and lasting balance maintained by production, distribution, marketing and other activities, reflecting the general sense of social stability and phenomenon of material stability. The economic phenomenon opposite to economic stability is economic instability, manifested as overproduction, rising prices, inflation, social unrest and other social phenomena. From this point of view, at present, for the economic and social development of China, the above-mentioned problems more or less still exist. The reason is that in our efforts developing the economy, we only paid attention to economic development and neglected other social construction that goes along with economic development. Improving people’s livelihood and improving the quality of life of the vast majority of the people is the best way to seize opportunities and resolve conflicts. Therefore, it is necessary for the government to persistently follow the policy line of “seeking progress through stability” and “seeking stability through progress”.

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9.2 Future Prospects: Issues to be Solved in the Research on Quality of Life Research on quality of life requires the participation and efforts of many disciplines. Although the research started late in China, it has begun to catch up. At present, there is weakness in developing and improving the indicators that most effectively measure social life and in exploring the relationship between the various variables in social life, that is, in structural relations. In addition, in the application of social research methods, standardization is not enough, resulting in the unsatisfactory quality of research. The most prominent problems are: (1) insufficient theoretical preparation and unclear theoretical framework; or the unsatisfactory combination of theoretical research and empirical operation. Due to the lack of sufficient and clear theoretical framework guidance, the research is somewhat “arbitrary”, and the research level and significance of the research conclusion are also limited. (2) The level of empirical analysis is still relatively limited, and there are still many shortcomings in the flexible application of high-level statistical methods and the integration and docking of data from topical studies. We look forward to more diversified and better results in the future. (1) How to define quality of life and make it operationalizable The concept of quality of life is complex and elusive, and the primary problem of exploring it is to make out the definition of the concept. However, to some extent the concept of quality of life is confusing due to researchers’ different professional backgrounds, the different social and economic development conditions they are in, and the general understanding of quality of life in people’s everyday life. Both in the medical community and the social science community, the research content of the quality of life at present covers a wide range. However, due to their different professional backgrounds and subject areas, researchers have different perceptions, perspectives and positions on quality of life, and so far, the definition of quality of life has not reached theoretical unification yet, and there are different views for different perceptions (Liu, 2008). The research on quality of life in China, especially, started late and is still under conceptual debate (Chen & Song, 2002). The core of defining the quality of life is to excavate its core characteristics first. The author agrees with Phillips (2006: 239–242) on his discussion over the core characteristics and definitions of quality of life. He summarized three characteristics of quality of life, at least at the individual level, and undoubtedly there was an agreement on the goal of avoiding pain and harm. Perhaps the starting point of this goal is the basic need. Whether in terms of basic capabilities, prudential values or elements in functionings (Nussbaum, 2000), meeting basic needs as minimum standards is the cornerstone of ensuring quality of life. Therefore, the primary characteristic of an individual’s quality of life is the satisfaction of important needs. Once the basic needs are met, the individual will have the opportunity to pursue other valuable activities. Sen’s capability approach provided a useful moral framework, giving individuals the

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freedom to choose independently between doings and beings, which further satisfies people’s needs, improves their enjoyment, grants people flourishing, or does all these things at the same time. Therefore, the second core value of quality of life is related to the autonomy of the subject. The third core characteristic is subjective well-being. This includes not only the presence or absence of satisfaction and positive affections, but also more specific eudaimonic elements, including life purpose and personal growth. On this basis, Phillips (2006: 242–243) concluded that quality of life has both individual and collective characteristics. At the individual level, it contains both objective and subjective components. People’s objective quality of life requires that their basic needs be met and that they have the necessary material resources to fulfill the social requirements of citizenship. Their subjective quality of life determines that they have the autonomy to make effective choices. (1) “Hedonism”—improving their subjective well-being, including hedonism, satisfaction and purpose in life and personal growth; (2) “Abundance” in Eudaimonic; (3) Participation in various social activities of citizenship. Collectively-focused quality of life requires sustainability in global environmental, including physical and social integration and coordination of social resources in communities where people live; extensive weak networks and connections at different social levels; a wide range of integrated norms and values including trust, reciprocity, and other behaviors; social norms and values that involve at least some degree of justice and equity. Although he put forward a core characteristic and main connotation of quality of life that is generally acceptable, how to further manipulate the variables remains a very important problem. For example, the question of how to define “basic needs” is different in different countries and regions. Individuals’ perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns… Individuals’ physical health, psychological state, level of independence, social relationships, personal beliefs and their relationship to salient features of their environment also come into play in a complex way… Quality of life refers to subjective assessment rooted in cultural, social and environmental contexts (WHO-QOL, 1993: 1). As each individual has different “important possibilities” in their life, and the extent to which they “enjoy” them is likely to be variable, so that the concept becomes so individually-specific as to be of little use for comparing the quality of life of different population groups (Rapley, 2003). Therefore, in the definition and operationalization of the concept of quality of life, how to maintain cultural relativity and individual specificity is an important problem that we are faced with. (2) How to deal with the measurement of factors affecting quality of life The standard of living has been maintained at a high level, but people’s subjective well-being is not necessarily very high, in developed countries this conflict is more prominent. Although the economic level of some areas is not very high, people still live a very peaceful and beautiful life. Economic development does not necessarily bring improvement in quality of life for all members of society. The emergence of this conflict reminds us of the discussion on subjective quality of life. What are the

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key factors measuring the quality of life? Besides objective indicators, can subjective indicators effectively reflect the real state of people’s life? The measurement of quality of life is controversial at the macro level, the subjective indicators themselves also are also under disagreement. This is mainly because, first, what subjective indicators express are a subjective, introspective concept based on personal experience. Therefore, Wang and Zhou (2004) believed that personal attitudes and concepts were constantly changing, and their changes were not related to the actual situation, which would lead to the instability of subjective evaluation; second, because of different reference standards, it is difficult to compare subjective evaluation between people; third, the process of people’s evaluation of a certain field is quite complicated and difficult to explain, even harder to quantify; fourth, empirical research showed that subjective evaluation and objective fact were disjointed, and the correlation between them tended to decline. Although there are some controversial issues for the measurement of quality of life, it is undeniable that it plays an indispensable role in the research on quality of life. Especially when objective quality of life measurement fails to touch on the essence of social phenomena and social events or social development trends need to be considered for their impact on the hearts of social members, subjective indicators naturally become the first choice for research (Zhou & Cai, 2004). Our studies have all demonstrated that the objective material conditions explain less than 20% of people’s quality of life, which results in the problem that the research on quality of life can lead to the exploration of social psychological factors of individual life. At the same time, when quality of life is explained and analyzed only by satisfaction or happiness, the research conclusions produced as such may face a certain degree of deviation. For example, the reliability and validity of sampling data, and in less developed areas, people’s self-evaluation of life may be given higher evaluation scores than in developed areas due to the difference in self-feeling and reference standards. (3) How to choose different methods to calculate quality of life factors At present, there are two main methods to calculate the factors affecting people’s quality of life: synthetical index method and regression analysis method. “Synthetical index method” is generally applied in policy analysis, mainly used to examine the process of economic and social development. This method can not only analyze the multidimensional areas that affect people’s quality of life, but also reflect its overall state of. A very important practical problem arises when the ordinal utility proposed by this new utilitarianism is used to measure the quality of life. Ordinal utility can usually be compared only when the “component composition” measurement method is used. The basic question that ensues from the compound theory is, whether it is possible to create an overall well-being order, or “can we go from a set of plural value rankings to a ranking or index of overall well-being?” (Qizilbash, 1997). Qizilbash began to try to do so by comparing prudential value indicators of developing countries at the international level. The indicators he used are: consumption per person (as a crude measure of happiness in prudential value); life expectancy of infant mortality (incorporating different minimum aspects of nutrition, health, sanitary accommodation, rest and safety, and different aspects of intellectual and

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physical capacity, although some double counting exists); adult literacy (the ability to read and write); the political rights index and the civil rights index (incorporating positive and negative aspects of freedom respectively) (Berlin, 1969). Each country’s score on these indicators was then ranked, and these rankings were added up to give each country an overall score (like the Borda Count in development studies). As long as there are not too many data missing, this approach can give a rough and ready score that handles the component composition problem and allows all countries to compare with each other. However, it does not solve the good life and weight composition problem. In addition, this method will inevitably lead to problems such as equivalence, ranking, weight and compatibility among indicators, which are important problems that “synthetical index method” cannot avoid. In the process of comprehensive evaluation, if the settings of indicators are the same for different years, then longitudinal comparison can be realized. If the indicators of different regions or countries are the same, horizontal comparison can be achieved. However, if the span of years is too long, or if different region or cultures attach different importance to some indicators, the setting of the same weight will overlook the most critical content that affects people’s life. Although the form of evaluation is retained, the actual connotation of evaluation is lost. Therefore, the value and significance of comprehensive evaluation can be better reflected only in relatively stable societies and regions, or in the period when the transmutation of relative values is not very drastic. “Regression analysis” is generally widely used in theoretical analysis, and its purpose is to understand which variables have a statistically significant impact on people’s quality of life, how these variables work and which variables are more important. There are also many problems in this measurement method, such as how to measure dependent variables more accurately, how to control confounding factors at different levels, and how to truly present the causal relationship between variables. With the development of statistical methods, we can not only present the working mechanisms between different variables through structural model, but also use hierarchical linear model for complex analysis of variables of different levels or variables collected in different years, thus bringing the research on quality of life more vitality and prosperity.

References Berlin, I. (1969). Two concepts of liberty, in Berlin, I. Four essays on liberty. Oxford University Press. Chen, G., & Song, X. M. (2002). The subjectivity and objectivity of quality of life of older people and its components. In B. H. Zhao (Ed.), Report on countermeasures to improve the quality of life of older people. Hualing Press. Cheng, G. Y. (1984). Philosophical analysis of quality of life: On the elements and evaluation of quality of life. Nangang Publisher.

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He, C. L., & Zhou, C. C. (2002). The concept of welfare and quality of life indicators: A study on the conceptual framework and structure of the European quality of life indicator system. Social Sciences Abroad, (01). Lin, N. (2015, January, 18). China’s social changes and development trends in 2014. Study Times. Liu, J. (2008). Study on the theoretical model of quality of life and its comprehensive evaluation of the elderly population in urban households. Qinghai Social Sciences, (06). Nussbaum, M. C. (2000). Women and human development: The capabilities approach. Cambridge University Press. Pan, J. H. (2003). Reflections on the concept of material desire consumption. Scientific Chinese, (37). Phillips, D. (2006). Quality of life: Concept, policy and practice. Routledge. Qizilbash, M. (1997). Pluralism and well-being indices. World Development, 25(12), 2009–2026. Rapley, M. (2003). Quality of life: A critical introduction. SAGE Publications Ltd. Shen, J. (2006). From “Adoration of GDP” to the care for well-being index—Profound turns in the views of development in perspective of theory of development. The Journal of Jiangsu Administration Institute, (03). Wang, K., & Zhou, C. C. (2004). New development in quality of life research: Construction and application of subjective indicators. Social Sciences Abroad, (04). WHO-QOL Group. (1993). WHOQOL study protocol. WHO. Zhou, C. C., & Cai, J. C. (2004). Quality of life indicators: From subjective perspective. Wuhan University Journal (Philosophy & Social Sciences), (05).

Afterword

Since the approval of this study by the National Social Science Fund of China as a Post-Fund Project in 2013, this project hasn’t been submitted due to many affairs. It is a very meaningful subject to carry out quantitative research on the quality of life from the perspective of social change, but it is also constrained by conditions such as the availability of data. Only by observing and measuring people’s quality of life in the long river of history can we understand the trend of social changes and know which social policies or economic activities have positive or negative impacts. Therefore, this book starts from the perspective of Western utilitarianism, prudential value, and capability development to understand the theoretical core of quality of life, and then presents a systematic, comprehensive, and diachronic picture of the changes in the subjective and objective quality of life of Chinese residents over the past few decades based on the data from authoritative yearbooks of China and large-scale survey databases such as CGSS and WVS. If the quality of life index can be more significant only if it is viewed from the perspective of social change, then how to better present the trend in our study and how to control the confounding factors in this research in a more scientific way are questions we must consider seriously when understanding the changes in quality of life. This book conducted a trend analysis of objective indicators for the quality of social development and an analysis of the age-period-cohort model from the dynamics of people’s subjective well-being, and the results presented can complement each other. However, the analysis conducted in the age-period-cohort model does not properly demonstrate the complex factors influencing diachronic changes of quality of life. Thus, how to better analyze these influencing factors based on longitudinal data and how to better introduce similar hierarchical age-periodcohort models for analysis are what we are pursuing in our follow-up research. As an achievement of the post-fund project, some parts of this book have been published in corresponding English and Chinese journals, which have received contributions and support from many collaborators. Here we would like to express our sincere thanks to the relevant journals and collaborators. To be specific, the section of “Research on Quality of Life: Social Demand and Policy Response” in Chap. 1 was published in Social Science Research (Wang & Li, 2010, Vol. 02). The © Social Sciences Academic Press 2023 P. Wang, Study on Quality of Life of Chinese Residents with Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2221-5

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second part of this chapter, “Discussion on Categories Related to the Research on Quality of Life”, was published in Study and Practice (Cui & Wang, 2010, Vol. 06). The section of “Literature Review of Research on Quality of Life in China and Western Countries” in Chap. 2 was published in Study and Practice (Wang, 2011, Vol. 11). Chapter 4 was published in Chinese Journal of Sociology (Wang, 2010, Vol. 04). Chapter 5 was published in the international journal Social Indicators Research (Wang Peigang & Vanderweele Tyler), and Springer and RightsLink have authorized this part for publication in Chinese under authorization numbers 3893971392564 (text) and 3893981348187 (figures and tables). Chapter 8 was first published in Social Sciences in China (internal circulation) (Wang & Jiang, 2017, Vol. 05). In addition, I would like to thank Zhang Lin for helping me with the final arrangement of the references. The book could not be accomplished and published without the careful work of Editor Hu Liang of Social Sciences Academic Press (CHINA), whose meticulous attitude and dedicated professionalism have greatly enhanced the publication of this book. Here, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks for her hard work! Due to the rush of time and my limited ability, errors and shortcomings in the book are inevitable. Any suggestions and comments are welcome! Wang Peigang June 8, 2017 East Lake, Wuhan University

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