Explaining the subjective well-being of urban and rural Chinese: Income, personal concerns, and societal evaluations

This study makes an integrated investigation of how subjective well-being is associated with income, personal concerns, and societal evaluations and how these social and psychological correlates of subjective well-being are contextualized within a country. Data used for the empirical analysis come from a nationally representative sample survey conducted in China in 2009. It is found that subjective well-being is independently linked to income, personal concerns, and societal evaluations. Comparisons of urban and rural Chinese further reveal that income, structural attributions of inequality, and evaluations of governance are related to subjective well-being among both groups. Nevertheless, different sets of other evaluative correlates of subjective well-being between urban and rural people stand out, which is conjectured to be related to the long-time institutional, economic, and social segmentation of the two groups. This study has contributed to both the subjective well-being theories and the understanding of the consequences of social inequality.