Abstract
Previous research sheds little light on changes in mental health conditions in former socialist countries that have undergone massive transformations. In this study, we utilize rarely available panel data from urban China to examine alterations in interpersonal trust, economic satisfaction, and psychological depression during the 2000s. We find that urban Chinese residents have become more satisfied with their economic conditions, but less trusting and, consequently, more depressed. Moreover, with increasing heterogeneity in urban areas, the gap between migrants and natives in trust has narrowed, resulting in a shrinking gap in depression. Conversely, the gaps in depression between coastal and inland residents and between political elites and others have widened, perhaps because of these groups’ different future outlooks. In general, our findings indicate that being in economically advantageous positions still benefits urban residents’ mental health. On the whole, however, Chinese urbanites have experienced more symptoms of psychological depression, despite their growing economic satisfaction with market reforms. The strong association between changes in trust and depression suggests that continued transformations of urban communities and rises in income inequality are likely to increasingly impact mental health through eroding interpersonal trust.
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Notes
To be clear, radical economic changes do not always bring increases or decreases in income inequality. Despite the shared experience of rapid economic growth, for example, income inequality has been stable or declined slightly in India and Brazil in recent years, whereas it has risen considerably in China (Jaumotte et al. 2008).
The exclusion of Tibet and Qinghai had to do with the size of cities in these provinces. Because the sample was selected from clusters of households using a systematic sampling scheme, and because the target sample size was not very large, cities with relatively few numbers of household clusters could end up with no cluster selected.
The rest of the items included are: “I felt lonely”; “I felt depressed”; “I felt sad”; “I had crying spells”; “I felt that people disliked me”; “I could not get ‘going’”; “I felt fearful”; “I felt everything was an effort”; and “people were unfriendly.”
Specifically, the panel survey was unable to follow through with respondents who moved far away. Hence, no individual included in both waves changed migrant status or residential area. A very small number of respondents changed their affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party during the 2 years, but taking this change into account made no difference to the results. For simplicity, we used the party affiliation at time 1 when measuring political capital.
In an exploratory analysis, we instead used the share of life spent in the current city to define migrant, as done in Yu’s (2008) study. We nevertheless found past hukou status to be a better predictor of changes in psychological conditions.
In an additional analysis, we included a proxy for cadres, assuming that all those who occupied administrative positions in the state sector and had CCP membership were cadres. The effect of CCP membership was virtually unchanged.
The reason we use province-level, rather than city-level, indicators for macrolevel conditions is that our data are far from representative at the city-level. As described earlier, a systematic sampling scheme was used to select household clusters across Chinese cities. Because of the total sample size, in most cities only one cluster of households were approached. Hence, respondents from most cities were selected from the same household cluster or the same neighborhood. The impossibility to separate city from neighborhood influences makes it more appropriate to measure macrolevel influences with province-level indicators, as the systematic sampling scheme would make the data nearly representative at the province level. We are nevertheless aware that there might be differences among cities within the same province. For this reason, in an additional analysis we fitted city fixed effects models, which take into account all unobserved city-level influences experienced by residents, with similar predictors and outcomes as in the models presented in the study, and the main results were similar.
This indicator is highly correlated with changes in the province’s gross domestic product and urban consumption level, but more accurately reflects changes in the overall living standards surrounding individuals. The results were virtually unchanged, however, when we used the latter two indicators in an exploratory analysis.
Because aging might be responsible for the increase in depression between the waves, we conducted an additional comparison of the average depression scores for the same age group at time 1 and time 2. The analysis clearly indicated that all age groups reported a higher level of depression at time 2. Thus, rather than a result of aging, the increase in depression among urban Chinese residents is likely to be a response to changes in their surroundings over time.
Specifically, we use coefficients from Model 2 for “trust at Wave I” to calculate the predicted probability at Wave I and coefficients from Model 2 for “change in trust” to calculate the probability at Wave II.
Specifically, if the percentage of migrants is 7.5 % or more, we consider the province to have a relatively high migrant concentration. Altering the percentage slightly did not affect the main results.
The coefficient for migrants in areas with more migrants is nearly significant with a p value of .06. This coefficient, however, is not statistically different from that for migrants in areas with fewer migrants, perhaps because the total number of migrants in the sample is too small to enable sufficient statistical power for this comparison. The evidence therefore is merely suggestive.
A calculation of predicted levels of depression for coastal and inland residents who are otherwise identical confirmed that both experienced increases in depression; the negative effect of coastal residence in Model 2 results from coastal residents’ slower increase in depression. A similar calculation of the predicted depression levels for CCP members and others at different waves also indicates that the CCP membership’s effect on change in depression should be interpreted in the same way.
Here we include change in economic satisfaction as a continuous variable for simplicity, because measuring it as a categorical variable led to nearly identical results. We introduce change in trust as a continuous variable in the next model for the same reason.
If an unobserved characteristic influences changes in both trust and depression, however, the estimates of Model 4 will be biased because of endogeneity, and change in trust might not have any real effect on change in depression. To examine this possibility, regression models for changes in trust and depression were tested using the seemingly unrelated regression technique. The results of the Breusch-Pagan test of independence indicated that the error terms for the two equations are uncorrelated, thus rejecting that there are unmodeled characteristics affecting both processes. We fitted similar regression models for changes in economic satisfaction and depression using the seemingly unrelated regression technique, and the results also rejected the existence of endogeneity bias. Despite these results, additional models that treated change in trust and change in economic satisfaction, respectively, as endogenous variables were further tested. We found little change in the effects of the two variables in the additional models.
When using depression at time 1 to predict change in economic satisfaction, the results also did not support that more depressed people tend to become relatively less satisfied with their economic conditions over time.
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Acknowledgments
Data used in this paper were drawn from the thematic research project “Social Capital: Its Origins and Consequences,” of which Nan Lin is the principal investigator. The authors are grateful to the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Institute of Sociology at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan for funding the data collection. The lead author also acknowledges the support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Center for Child Health and Human Development grant R24-HD041041, awarded to the Maryland Population Research Center.
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Yu, Wh., Chiu, CT. Growing Pains: Changes in Psychological Well-Being in Urban China. Soc Indic Res 129, 1349–1382 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-1166-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-1166-4