China's Migrant Workers The Core Is The Choice Of The Reference Group

Along with the social development and urbanization in China, the state has paid more and more attention to the problem of migrant workers. The government has issued a series of policies to protect and enhance the migrant workers’ interests. But those policies did not change the conflict situation of migrant workers in the city, who make more criminal friction and clashes with the urban public. This circumstance is closely related to the change of the reference group of migrant workers. From the inter-generational perspective, we can divided migrant workers into old and new generations, the new generation of migrant workers have high levels of literacy and personal qualities, have higher job and life expectations, and they are more eager to integrate into the city. So they chose city people as its core reference group. In comparison with the urban public, the new generation of migrant workers had a higher relative deprivation, which led to more conflict behavior.The paper will research the trend that the migrant workers chose what as they core reference group by empirical data. And we will reveal the migrant workers’ conflict as the point of their core reference group’s change. The thesis is divided into five parts:In the first part, we describe the research background, meaning and ideas, and summarized what led migrant workers’ social conflict through the existed literatures;In the second part, we analyzes on the basis of the definitions and research scholars on the reference group, relative deprivation and conflict, build the path from reference group’s change to the cause of conflict. Then we confirm the migrant workers’ core reference group had been changed from rural residents to urban residents;In the third part, we chose the migrant workers’ personal characteristics: gender, generation, educational level, income level, watching TV or not, the internet or not, having the responsibility farmland at home or not, personal motives, environmental factors, and self-efficacy variables as the factors which affect the choice of the migrant workers reference group; What we chose is based on previous studies and the characteristics of the migrant workers; In the fourth part, by factor analysis, correlation analysis, variance analysis and multiple regression analysis, we verify that the personal characteristics of gender, generation, income level, watching TV or not, internet or not, having the responsibility farmland at home or not, personal motives, environmental factors, and self-efficacy have significantly affected the migrant workers core reference group selection;In the fifth part, we advise the government reform the household registration, improve social security and welfare in order to ease the relative deprivation of migrant workers and reduce the potential for conflict, and then maintain social stability.