An Empirical Study On The Relationship Of The Mass Media And Subjective Well-being

The way the mass media affects the creation of public value and the way citizens use the media have been experiencing tremendous changes in transitional economies. This article aims to investigate "the way individuals use the media", "to what extent individuals trust the media", and the "subjective wellbeing", with a focus on four questions. First of all, it investigates how the mass media played its role in the process of creating one particular type of the public value, namely "subjective wellbeing". Second, drawing on the social categorization theory, this study investigates how heterogeneous social groups developed their own opinions regarding the subjective wellbeing. Third, this study examines which factors are related to the subjective wellbeing. Fourth, this paper examines how the "media use" and the "subjective welling" change under different levels of "media trust".This paper is based on the Chinese part of the "World Value Survey" conducted by the Research Center for Contemporary China of Peking University. The survey sampled the whole population aged between 18 and 75, and it contains data related to respondents’ "media use", "media trust", and "subjective wellbeing" regarding two types of the media, the newspapers and the TV. By using SPSS (21.0), we conducted a descriptive statistical analysis, a cross-table analysis, an ANOVA for a single factor, and a linear regression analysis.The results show that "media use" and "media trust" both have significant impacts on citizens’"subjective wellbeing". Based on the social categorization theory, we extracted eight sub-samples according to respondents’"gender", "age", "marriage status", "educational level", "family income", "political trust", "media use", and "media trust". We found that respondents’subjective welling varied significantly across sub-samples. Unlike prior research, we found that among the variables which could affect citizens’subjective wellbeing, gender and age are not correlated with the subjective wellbeing, and the demographic variables had relatively small impacts on the subjective wellbeing. Among these variables, the marriage status and the educational level are negatively associated with the subjective wellbeing. The family income is negatively associated with the subjective wellbeing. The political trust is positively associated with the subjective wellbeing. The media use (TV) is positively related to the subjective wellbeing. The media trust (for both newspapers and TV) is positively related to the subjective wellbeing. What we need to pay attention to is that although the use of newspaper and the use of TV are associated with the subjective wellbeing, the associations are not stable across different circumstances.Therefore, this paper argues that we should take into account one additional variable, the media trust, when we discuss the relationship between "mass media" and "subjective wellbeing", instead of only focusing on the impact of "media use".