The Influence Of Rural-urban Migrant Workers’ Social Niche On Psychological Integration

The rural-urban migrant workers are the special social groupemerged in the transition stage of Chinese society. They play animportant role in the driving of Chinese economic growth andstable development of the urbanization. However, the rural-urbanmigrant workers are still in the edge of the society and have a lot ofdifficulties in integrating into the society. When the peasants go outfor work, their primary purpose is to increase economic income. Sothey often enter a new field. However, because the human capital ofrural-urban migrant workers is short and they are engaged inmanual labor, the stability and the income of their work is low, theireconomic position can hardly be improved. Their low social positionlimits the reconstruction of the rural-urban migrant workers’ socialnetworks, which makes the extension of their social network scalehard, the relationship structure of their social network sole, thesocial capital within the system and the citizens’ relationship in thesocial network short. The long-term isolation from the citizensaggravated the citizens’ exclusion and discrimination against theexternal population and led to the inferiority feeling and theirexclusion to the citizens, which hampers the rural-urban migrantworkers from adapting and accepting the culture of cities. In this case, the social integration of the rural-urban migrant workers iseffected by the reconstruction of social networks, the field, and theadaption to the culture. The researches at present only involved therelationship between the above sole aspects and the socialintegration and there is no research that aggregates these factorsto investigate their relationship with the social integration.However, the comprehensive concept of social networks, field, andculture can reflect the living environment and living state of socialpeople.Firstly, this dissertation uses the theory of niche to propose aconcept that roundly reflects the living environment and livingstate of social people—social niche, which is in fact the protectingroom one needs for living including natural environment protectingroom, social network protecting room, field protecting room, andcultural protecting room. Social niche has uniqueness,competitiveness, mutuality, plasticity and complexity. On the basisof the previous researches, this dissertation sets the measuringindex of every protecting room in the social niche. By the crosstable, this dissertation combines the real situation of therural-urban migrant workers and analyzes the current situation ofthe rural-urban migrant workers’ social niche under thecharacteristics of different individuals and mobility, such as socialnetwork protecting room, field protecting room and culturalprotecting room and analyzes the correlation of the three aspects.The results shows that the social network protecting room showssignificant differences in the aspects such as gender, age,maritalstatus,education,physical condition, field, industry; the field protecting room shows significant differences in the aspects suchas gender, age, marital status, education, physical condition, worktime, change of work; the cultural protecting room showssignificant differences in the aspects such as maritalstatus,education,physical condition, field,change of work.Thereare significant differences in the three protecting rooms.Secondly,by the cross table, the dissertation analyzes thecurrent situation of the rural-urban migrant workers’ psychologicalintegration under the characteristics of different individuals andmobility. The results shows that the rural-urban migrant workers’psychological integration shows significant differences in theaspects such as gender, age, education, field, industry-Based onthis, according to the theoretical foundation, the dissertationproposes a hypothesis, builds the regression model and analyzesthe influence of the variable of social niche on the three aspectssuch as the identity of urban resident, the sense of belong in citiesand the social distance by multielement logistic and OLSregression model.The empirical study finds that the social networkprotecting room, field protecting room, and cultural protectingroom of the social niche have influence on the rural-urban migrantworkers’ psychological integration. The influence extent of thescale, the relationship structure and the quality of the socialnetwork on the rural-urban migrant workers’ psychologicalintegration is different. Network size、intermediate network scale、outside the network size、the proportion of strong ties in the totalnumber of people、the proportion of Betweenness relationship inthe total number of people、the proportion of public servants in the total number of people and the proportion of citizens in the totalnumber of people have influence on the psychological integrationof rural-urban migrant workers. The variables of field protectingroom make effect on the psychological integration of rural-urbanmigrant workers in different extent.The monthly income, theprofessional class, the ownership of house,the satisfaction on workand the training experience have positive influence on thepsychological integration of rural-urban migrant workers. Thecultural protecting room of rural-urban migrant workers hasinfluence on their psychological integration. In this dissertation,Buing insurance doesn’t have significant influence on thepsychological integration of rural-urban migrant workers.Whetheror not discrimination and the mastery degree of dialect haveinfluence on the psychological integration of rural-urban migrantworkers.Lastly, on the basis of the empirical study, this dissertationproposes some suggestions of improving the social niche ofrural-urban migrant workers and promoting the social integration ofrural-urban migrant workers from the aspects such as building thecommunication platform of rural-urban migrant workers--citizensthrough encouragement and guidance, perfecting the socialsecurity system, strengthening the protection of rural-urbanmigrant workers’ rights and interests, building the professionaleducation and skill training system.