Role Identity, Social Support And Self-esteem Of Land-lost Peasants And The Interaction Mechanism Of The Three Variables

With the acceleration of industrialization and urbanization in recent years, the demandfor agricultural land transforming into construction land is constantly growing,which led tothe generation of a large number of land-lost peasants. As for the long-term urban-ruraldual structure in our country, urban and rural areas were demarcated. Without anypreparation,they enter the city in the process of land expropriation and must adjust to thechanges in living,work and relationships with other people. These peasants are nominallytaken as a citizen,but they themselves often lose their identity as nominal urbancitizen,usually having a sense of uncertainty.So far, many of them are still not integratedinto urban life, some even live in the edge of the city.As the number of this group increases,the question of whether they can really identify with their public role, and really adapt tocity life is more and more important not only for the smooth progress of urbanization,butalso for healthy economic and social development all over the country.Therefore, it isundoubtedly necessary and meaningful to carry out around the problem of land-lostpeasants.Based on the study of the existing literature, and for the practical needs, this researchintroduce the three variables of role identity, social support and self-esteem to deepen thestudy of land-lost peasants from a new perspective.Literature, empirical research methodsand case interview are applied.1000land-lost peasants of ChangShu City (and recoveredvalid questionnaires722) took part in the questionnaire survey, and case interviews of22people were conducted. The main conclusions are as follows:Firstly, Changshu land-lost peasants have not yet completed the transition frompeasants into citizen on role cognition, experience and behavior. Judging from the resultsof the survey,"role cognition"," role experience" and "role behavior" scores are all slightlyhigher than the critical value. Combined with results of case interviews,the research gets enough evidence to confirm the uncertainty in land-lost peasants’ role injugement.Numbersof them are still in the period of role transition.Secondly,social support of land-lost peasants in ChangShu is at the middle level,while they get a higher score in self-esteem,indicating a relatively strong sense ofself-value and self-importance.Thirdly, the three variables of role identity, social support, and self-esteemsignificantly differ in land-lost peasants’ age, education level, time of land requisition andchanges of income contrasting with before.Fourthly, role identity, social support and self-esteem have a significant positivecorrelation with each other and role identity plays a partial mediation effect between socialsupport and self-esteem. Social support can not only affect self-esteem directly, but alsolead to higher overall self-esteem by raising the level of the individual roleidentity.Currently, many land-lost peasants of Changshu are still uncertain about their roleof citizen, and some get relatively low levels of self-esteem. More targeted social supportwill play a vital and positive role in promoting their role identity and enhancing theirperception of self-worth.This paper creatively introduced the three variables of role identity, social support andself-esteem at the same time,displaying a more comprehensive picture of the status quo ofthis group, and the three were organized into a single theoretical model being furtherclarify the interaction mechanism. The model is not only to provide new direction and pathto promote the land-lost peasants’ role indentity as citizen,but also to enrich the domesticrole identity theory and effectively to achieve both theoretical and practical applications.