Living space and psychological well-being in urban China: Differentiated relationships across socio-economic gradients

Abstract

Western research has shown that a shortage of living space is associated with poor psychological well-being. By contrast, norms and practices of extended family co-residence, collectivist social organization and a bureaucratic quota-based housing allocation system were thought to limit the adverse psychological effects of cramped dwelling conditions in pre-reform China. As these buffers may be weakening with the dramatic housing reforms, socio-economic and cultural changes taking place in post-reform urban China, we use data from the 2010 China Family Panel Studies (N = 13,367) to re-examine the relationship between living space and psychological well-being in contemporary Chinese cities. In particular, we examine the ways in which this relationship is moderated by family wealth and community poverty in order to explore how subjective experiences of dwelling space are shaped by one's relative socio-economic position. The results show that cramped living conditions are significantly associated with poor psychological well-being in post-reform urban China. Importantly, the psychological implications of cramped dwellings may vary with family and particularly community socio-economic status as this association tends to be stronger amongst more affluent families and communities than among those that are more impoverished. Taken together the findings indicate that uneven socio-economic development, segmented cultural change and drastic housing reforms within China's cities may be interacting to configure people's housing experiences and health outcomes.

Housing Inequality in Urban China: Theoretical Debates, Empirical Evidences, and Future Directions

“…Zhang, Zhang, and Hudson 2018). Living with small housing space, particularly in high-poverty communities, is significantly associated with poor psychological well-being (Y. Hu and Coulter 2017).…”

Association of living density with anxiety and stress: A cross‐sectional population study in Hong Kong

“…Evans and colleagues have conducted research and reviews on this topic (Evans, 2001; Evans, Lercher, & Kofler, 2002; Evans, Saltzman, & Cooperman, 2001; Evans et al., 2003), and found negative impact of overcrowding on psychological distress. However, these studies focused on the Western context, wherein the housing situation and the perception of residents differ from those in the Eastern or Chinese context (Forrest, La Grange, & Yip, 2002; Hu & Coulter, 2017; Xiao, Miao, Sarkar, Geng, & Yi, 2018; Xie, 2019).…”

Quantitative Models of Well-Being to Inform Policy: Problems and Opportunities

“…The first round of objections to the validity of the SWB approach focused on questioning whether respondents all interpret the subjective scale in the same manner. However, although measurement of SWB appears to rely on an assumption of individual rationality (which a large literature on cognitive bias tells us is unwarranted), SWB has been demonstrated to correlate reliably with many objective measures, such as age [17], income [18], genetics [19], relationships, discrimination against sexual minorities [20], parenting [21], employment and health [22][23][24], innovation [25], living arrangements [26,27], migration [28,29], empowerment [30], environment [31] and mixtures of all the above [32] (although a reviewer of this paper notes a research gap in the meta-analysis of studies of this nature). SWB is also less susceptible than might be thought to measurement bias caused by differences between nations and cultures [33].…”