Homeownership Behavior Predicting

Clothes, food, transportations and housing don’t just meet people’s physical need since the economy and human culture have developed so much. For the housing issue, house is not only for living, but also be a symbolic identity pesession. Besides, there are researches which have found that immigrants from different cultures have different homeownership rates. In this research, we tried to quantize people’s homeownership behavior, and predict it from a psychological perspective. Our researches follows four steps:first, two projection tests were conducted to explore what the house can symbolize and what buying a home will bring to people; second, psychological scales were created and be used to conduct researches in the following; third, two implicit association tests were designed to explore how people value buying or renting in the implicit level; fourth, research into how the Mosuo People value their house and compare it with earlier research result basing on Han people. Four research method were used, including two projection tests, four scales be created, two implicit association test and deep interview to19Mosuo family.After a series of scientific work, our research:(1) Design two projecting test to explore how the housing choice can stand for people’s personality traits and to explore what people expect homeownership will bring to them. The results show:first, people who choose to have a home in a metropolitan was believed to be more competent, and woman who choose to have her own home was seen as Independent. Second, people expect owning a home will bring them more dignity, which is the social identity value, more secure feeling, which is the hedonic value, a place for them to arrange their life easier, which is functional value, and more economic profit; at the same time, buying a house might causing more pressure in there economic and impede their career developing in some way.(2) According to the mature psychology research method, we developed the Homeownership Behavior questionnaire, Self-evaluation scale, Indulgence orientation scale, Theory of Planning Behavior scale, and Homeownership consumer value scale. Homeownership Behavior questionnaire was made up of home choice and homeownership behavior intention; Self-evaluation scale was made up of competent dimension and independent dimension; Indulgence orientation scale was made up of importanty of leisure time and control over life; Homeownership consumer value scale was made up of social value dimension, self-hedonic dimension, negative consequence dimension, others-hedonic dimension, policy conditional value dimension, functional value dimension and negative belief value dimension. All measures have good reliability and validity, which are qualified to be used in the following researches.(3) For the Homeownership behavior questionnaire, there is a trade off between housing quality and housing position:people who would like to choose a secondhand apartment usually also choose a position a little far from downtown, a smaller square, long mortgage time and all of these was trade off to get a high score in the province rating; people who leave their hometown and choose to buy their home where they work are usually moving to a more developed province and city, and this movement also requires they buy a home a little far from downtown; personal income and family income are both indicators might lead to high score in province position and city position; more education usually lead to high score in the city position; comparing with people who live in the urban area, people who live in the rural area usually buy their home a little further from downtown place, and have smaller area; at last, buying a home always show together with getting marriage,80%people choose to buy their home around their marriage.(4) For the Homeownership consumer value scale, there is a sequence in different dimensionscores:selfhedonic value> fuctional value> social value> others-hedonic value> policy conditional value> negative consequence> negative belief value. Within the sequence, negative consequence and negatie belief value dimensions were not significant different from the scalar midpoint2while all other dimensions higher than4. Women score higher in self-hedonic and fuctional value dimension than men, while lower in negative consequence dimension; the deeper intimate relationship people were involved, the more positive consumer value they gave to homeownership(including social value, self-hedonic value, policy conditional value, and fuctional value); the more education people have, the lower score on social value dimension and policy conditional value; higher personal income indicated higher social value, higher policy conditional value, and lower negative consequence. According to the pair items in the consumer value scale, people agree with the benefits of homeownership very much, especially on the benefits of children’s education, which are very important to them; at the same time, people don’t agree about the negative consequence of homeownership very much, and even they do agree on this issue, it doesn’t matter very much to their lives. The most dramative example for this is that most people agree that buying a home will make them suffer from economic shortage, but economic shortage is the least thing they care.(5) Using culture value scales, self-evaluation scale, indulgence orientation scale, TPB scale and Homeownership consumer value scale, we explores how they predict peoples’homeownership behavior, including how people choose where and what kind of home to buy and when to buy. A model was drawn based on the data analysis result. According to the model, long-term orientation, Conformity to norms will predict on homeownership consumer value significantly, then consumer value and self-evaluation can predict on people’s housing choice directly. The most heterogeneous homeownership choice index is the area of apartment and it location within the city:they trade off these when they think they will have an economic crisis, and they choose the multi-levels residence and close to downtown position when people feel they are competent. On the other side, long-term orientation, conformity to norms and indulgence orientation also have significant prediction on the TPB variables. At last, more positive attitude toward homeownership, higher perceived social norms pressure will make people start to pay their housing mortgage earlier, while higher perceived control predict shorter mortgage time.(6) According to what we have found in the homeownership consumer value scale, two Implicit Association Test was designed:One is for the positive homeownership IAT effect, the other is for the negative homeownership IAT effect. Result of experiment one shows that people do perceived homeownership to be good in the IAT level, while result of experiment two didn’t support its hypothesis but get another positive homeownership IAT effect only smaller than experiment one. In all, there is no negative IAT effect for homeownership in both experiments. The correlation between IAT effect value and other measures shows that there are no significant relation between IAT values and the Homeownership consumer value, but significantly correlate with self-evaluation. We think this indicated that the implicit homeownership value is totally different psychological construct from the explicit measures, the former is more like a personality traits which are close to self-evaluation while the later is a conscious judgment.(7) In the projection test and survey research, we found that homeowhership was always connected with marriage and the transition of family structure. While the Mosuo people don’t have a formal marriage like Han people, and they have much bigger family. Concerning to these differences, we went to Yunnan Province to explore whether they develop some different value over they residence. According to what we found, the Mosuo people didn’t build their house to please their mate or other people, so there is no others-hedonic value, they didn’t change their family structure immediately after marriage, and the housing has cultural identity value for them. Except for these, Mosuo houses also serve for the functional value (they must) and social value.For now, people are arguing that the housing price is too high and the government should figure out how to lower the housing price, but there is a problem in the logic that high housing price should go down:do we have to buy our home? Our research fills this gap by using psychological method to quantify people’s homeownership behavior and their consumer value. Besides that, we try to do some prediction from the psychological perspective, which open the door of helping people buy their home properly and explore why people from different culture background have different homeownership rates.