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Work, Family, and Gendered Happiness Among Married People in Urban China

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Abstract

Previous studies on subjective well-being primarily focus on individuals’ own characteristics. Pooling data from recent Chinese General Social Surveys (N = 9445), we examine individual happiness among young and middle-aged married people in urban China, by taking into account their spouses’ characteristics. Drawing on the male breadwinner model, we reveal that husband’s employment is much more strongly related to individual happiness of both the husband and the wife than wife’s employment. In addition, a man’s contribution to the household income has a more positive effect on his happiness than a woman’s contribution on her happiness. Meanwhile, those coresiding with both dependent children and parents have lower likelihoods of happiness than those with no dependents. Our results demonstrate that gender roles remain strictly defined in urban China, in which the husband bears the breadwinner role and the wife assumes the homemaker role. Relatedly, living with both parents and dependent children does not lessen the level of happiness any more for women than for men, suggesting that Chinese women do not shirk their caregiving responsibilities.

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Notes

  1. The terms “quality of life”, “subjective well-being”, and “happiness” differ in meanings, but we follow the previous literature and use them interchangeably, for ease of presentation, to describe an individual’s subjective assessment of life (e.g., Brockmann et al. 2009; Easterlin 2003; Wu et al. 2012).

  2. We used Stata’s mi impute mvn command to impute missing data and the mi estimate command to estimate regression models using multiply imputed data.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to improve the quality of the paper.

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  1. Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, 238 Townshend Hall, 1885 Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Yue Qian & Zhenchao Qian

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  1. Yue Qian
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Qian, Y., Qian, Z. Work, Family, and Gendered Happiness Among Married People in Urban China. Soc Indic Res 121, 61–74 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0623-9

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