A Study Of The Network Of Economic Support Among The Urban Poor

In recent years, the problem of urban poverty has become more and more serious in China. To research on this problem and help to solve it has become one of the most important tasks in China's effort to build a harmonious society. Most of the research on urban poverty in China has been done from the macro perspective of China's economic transformation and in the context of xiagang and unemployment, with many studies aimed instrumentally at formulating countermeasures to perfect the minimum protection system, while in-depth and more detailed research aimed at a good grasp of the actual life situation of the urban poor and the social field associated with it, and of the social structural characteristics of urban poverty in China is still quite inadequate.With the network of economic support for the urban poor as a point of departure, this study introduces the method of network analysis to the study of poverty. With the poor of Harbin and Shenyang as the population, multi-staged random sampling was used to determine a sample of 443 individuals. The confidence level of inferences about the population based on such a sample is 95%. Data were collected using a combination of survey with a questionnaire at the respondent' home and structured interview. Based on these, this study attempts at a detailed and in-depth study of issues such as the state of the economic life of urban poor families, characteristics and functions of their economic support networks, and the extent to which these affect the degree of their poverty from the perspective of the structure of social networks.From the survey conducted for this study, it is discovered that women are greatly overrepresented among the urban poor; that 42.5% of the urban poor live in broken families; that 39.7% of them do not have capacity for work; that most of the urban poor have educational attainment of junior high school or lower; that individuals who are never-employed, off-job, and unemployed make up the bulk of the urban poor; that the 40-50 cohort is the mode in the age distribution of the urban poor; and that 1/3 of the urban poor experience primary poverty while 2/3 experience secondary poverty. In terms of the state of the economic life, these...