Abstract
The young post-1980s generation in Hong Kong has been a focus of attention in the mass media because of their radical behavior and the difficulties they face in their lives. Although results from analyses with population census data have revealed the worse-off socioeconomic situations encountered by the young post-1980s generation, a full understanding of their subjective well-being has yet to be obtained. Considering the fact that subjective well-being is part of the quality of life, in this chapter, we attempt to examine the life satisfaction of the post-1980s generation in Hong Kong. Based on the data from a territory-wide representative survey in 2007, we find that individuals from the post-1980s generation in Hong Kong are significantly less happy or have a lower level of subjective well-being, after controlling for other sociodemographic features, their evaluation of the local government, and their normative judgment of fairness and opportunity.
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Notes
- 1.
The term is borrowed from Mainland China, where people of that age have grown up under the one-child policy and most have no experience of the Tiananmen Square Incident in 1989.
- 2.
In discussing the term “subjective well-being,” various scholars have tried to differentiate life satisfaction from happiness conceptually (Diener and Lucas 2000; Wong et al. 2006). While life satisfaction is regarded as a global cognitive judgment of one’s life and is frequently used to measure one’s subjective well-being, happiness refers to an affective or emotional state, which is sensitive to sudden changes in mood.
- 3.
Nevertheless, he qualifies that although goal discrepancies in various life domains decrease with age, the opposite effect is found in the area of health.
- 4.
Multivariate regression analyses failed to demonstrate the independent effect of age.
- 5.
As the dependent variables of all models are of ordinal level which are categorical and ordered, it is statistically more appropriate to use ordinal or ordered logit regression models than ordinary linear regression. A further point to note is that distance between two adjacent categories in ordinal variables is unknown. Although the interpretation of coefficients from ordinal regression is not very straightforward, it is equally not desirable to assign an arbitrary metric to each of the ordered categories in our dependent variables should we employ OLS regression models as we have no basis for assuming that the distance between each pair of adjacent categories is uniform.
- 6.
Readers are recommended to refer to Greene (2003) for how to interpret the cutoff points in ordered logit regression models.
- 7.
The results from the ordinal logistic regression analyses (Table 15.1) are partly consistent with the findings from the simple cross tabulation (Table A.1). In Table A.1, a larger proportion of those from recent cohorts, especially the post-1980s generation, report being more satisfied with their overall life and with different aspects of the HKSAR government, except the educational policy. In spite of an insignificant difference in overall life satisfaction between birth cohorts presented in Model 1, Table 15.1 indicates that variation across birth cohorts disappears after taking into account other sociodemographic variables.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful for the comments and suggestions from anonymous reviewers and the financial support from the Research Grants Council via a Strategic Public Policy Research Fund (HKUST6001-SPPR-08) and an internal Research Project Competition from HKUST (RPC10HSS04).
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Ip, CY., Wu, XG. (2012). Subjective Well-Being of the Post-1980s Generation in Hong Kong: Implications for Social and Political Stability. In: Yi, CC. (eds) The Psychological Well-being of East Asian Youth. Quality of Life in Asia, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4081-5_15
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