A Study Of Urban Residents’ Selective Acceptance Towards Floating Population

With the rapid development of economic reform as well as urbanization andindustrialization, floating population are migrating into big or medium-sized cities gradually.They participate in and contribute greatly to the urban development. Meanwhile, they have toface a lot of challenges in their daily life, the toughest one is how to integrate into urban.There are many domestic researches focusing on the floating population including a series oftheoretical researches and applied researches. The findings revealed the life situation, status,identity, social capital for this group, and the obstacles in the process of social integrationfrom the floating population’s view. However, social integration is a mutual process betweenthe local residents and the floating population, not just the floating population involve into thelocal community on their own. Social integration has to do with the extent of how localresidents accept them in attitude and behavioral levels. Therefore, promoting urban resident’sacceptance towards floating population is critical step for encouraging social integration.In this study, based on the previous researches on floating population as references, theauthor investigated nine communities of Y district in Jinan by the form of questionnaire andindividual interview with urban residents’ view, in order to know the situation of urbanresidents’ acceptance towards floating population, to explore root causes and find outsuggestions for improvement. The study results showed that the acceptance is selective, thatis, urban residents’ acceptance is various with different groups and different ranks. Interactionopportunity, frequency, social status (including age, degree of education, income level, andcareer) and interaction properties are not only important influencing factors for acceptance,degree of acceptance and relationship in existence, but also is significantly correlated withthem. Furthermore, according to data of interview, the author found the historical evolution oftwo-dimension household registry system; and concerning about losing resource andcompetition are also causes for selective acceptance. Finally, the author provided suggestionsfor promoting mutual interactions between these two groups and also implications for socialwork practice.