Generational And Regional Differences Of Residents’ Life Satisfaction In China

Over30years of reform and opening up, China has witnessed a sustained rapid economic.growth, and China has taken on altogether new aspect. But according to the blue book of social attitudes, published by the Institute of Sociology, chinese academy of social science, only47%of the residents were satisfied with their life in our country in2011, and the proportion was reduced to44.7%in2012. Residents’life satisfaction has not improved markedly along with the rapid growth of GDP. Studing the factors of residents’life satisfaction, so as to find out the existing problems, can provide certain reference for the government to make policies on people’s livelihood.Based on the significance of the research and the systematic literature review of life satisfaction, the thesis first analizes the influence factors of life satisfaction in theory and constructs life satisfaction index system.And then, using CFPS data, it studies influence factors of life satisfaction and examines the differences of between generations and distinctions between regions. Finally some suggestions are proposed to improve residents’life satisfaction. The text is divided into five parts:The first part is introduction. This chapter first expounds the background and significance of the research, then reviews the domestic and foreign literatures of life satisfaction, and gives some comments, finally the organization of the whole paper is laid out.The second part is the theory of life satisfaction and the construction of life satisfaction index system. Based on the connotation of life satisfaction, this part first introduces measurement of life satisfaction and related theories, analize the influence factors of life satisfaction in theory. Then selecting indicators based on the principles of constructing index system, the paper proposes the life satisfaction index system, which taking into account four areas:demographic characteristics, living conditions, quality of intellectual lives and social environment.The third part is to introduce the empirical analysis method. The binary logistic regression model which is used to analyze the residents’life satisfaction is introduced from the aspects of parameter estimation methods, model evaluation, model test and the selection of independent variable.The fourth part is the empirical analysis of residents’life satisfaction. CFPS data is used in the empirical analysis. When analyzing the generational differences, the sample is divided into three parts include elderly, middle aged and young people. Then this paper build model respectively for the three parts and contrastively analyze the generational difference of residents’life satisfaction. As for the regional differences, this paper first makes a clustering for the31provinces of our country with the related economic and social development indicators, and the31provinces is divided into three parts. Then this paper build model respectively for the three areas and contrastively analyze the regional differences of residents’life satisfaction.The fifth part is the conclusions and policy recommendations. This part summarizes the empirical results of this paper and makes some policy recommendations to improve the livelihood of the people.This paper’s main conclusions are as followings. The influence factors of urban residents’life satisfaction have obvious differences between generations, the elderly people pay more attention to the quality of spiritual life than the middle aged and the young. The difference of rural residents’life satisfaction factors between generations is not obvious. The elderly people in rural area value their material income more than those in urban, income level has a significant impact on life satisfaction of the elderly in rural area. The level of public education in rural area is generally lower, which directly affects the quality of life to some extent. Life satisfaction in backward regions is more sensitive to income. Highly educated people have higher expectation of life, which will weaken the positive effect of education on life satisfaction.