Abstract
Either objective or subjective social status is linked with subjective well-being (SWB) in a variety of ways. However, the exact mechanism underlying this relationship remains unknown. The present study investigates whether future time perspective (FTP) mediates the linkage of social status and SWB. A total of 3937 Chinese adults (M = 34.68 years; SD = 9.67) participated in the study. Pearson correlation analysis indicated the positive correlations between social status, FTP, and SWB. Stepwise regression showed that objective social status had a weakly linear effect on SWB, and subjective social status was more closely related to SWB than objective social status. The structural equation model showed that FTP functioned as a mediator in the relations between objective/subjective social status and SWB, which indicated that people with a higher objective and subjective status had high scores on FTP and those concentrated on future reported greater SWB. Overall, our findings do support the mediating effect of FTP in explaining the associations of two forms of social status and well-being. Implications of these results for understanding the connection among study variables were discussed.
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Data Availability
The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.
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Funding
This research was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (SWU1909027), the Chongqing Humanities and Social Science Key Research Base Project (18SKB02), the Key project of Chongqing Social science Planning (2021NDZD09), and the Chongqing education science “14th five-year plan” key project (2021-GX-003).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Lyu Houchao and Li Xiaobao. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Li Xiaobao and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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This study was approved by the ethics committee of Faculty of Psychology at Southwest University. The participants signed an informed consent form stating the aim of the study and explaining that they could withdraw from the study, and the data would be anonymous.
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Xiaobao Li and Houchao Lyu are co-first authors.
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Li, X., Lyu, H. Social Status and Subjective Well-Being in Chinese Adults: Mediating Effect of Future Time Perspective. Applied Research Quality Life 17, 2101–2116 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-021-10026-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-021-10026-8