The Long-Term Impact of Adversity in Adolescence on Health in Middle and Older Adulthood: A Natural Experiment From the Chinese Send-Down Movement

Abstract

The 1950s–1970s Chinese send-down movement can be treated as a natural experiment to study the impact of adolescent exposure on subsequent health. This paper used China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) 2010 data to evaluate the long-term impact of the Chinese send-down movement on individuals health later in life. Drawing from the life course perspective, the results from the difference-in-difference model suggested that the send-down experience had a significant impact on worse self-rated health; the pathways from structural equation models showed that subsequent achievements—age of marriage and educational attainment—had mediating effects leading the send-down experience to worse self-rated health and better mental 21health, respectively. Taken together, our results highlight the roles of the send-down experience and post–send-down characteristics in shaping health outcomes later in life.

Earthquake exposure during adolescence and later-life depressive symptoms: A national cross-sectional survey

“…The cohort DID method is a quasi-experimental design that obtains an appropriate counterfactual to estimate a causal effect ( Guo et al, 2020 ; Luo et al, 2023 ). Using the cohort DID method to infer the causal effect of exposure to life shocks has been verified to have good validity and broadly applied in previous studies ( Athey & Imbens, 2006 ; He et al, 2019 ), such as the effect of famine (P. He, Liu, et al, 2018 ; ( He et al, 2018 ); H. Xu et al, 2018 ; Xu et al, 2016 ), earthquake ( Guo et al, 2019 ), flood ( Guo et al, 2020 ), the SARS epidemic ( Guo & Zheng, 2021 ), war ( He et al, 2019 ; Lee, 2014 ), and the send-down movement in rural China ( Chen et al, 2020 ; Luo et al, 2023 ; Ye et al, 2021 ) on later life health outcomes. The concept of the cohort DID method is to explore geographic variations in earthquake exposure in addition to cohort variations ( Xu et al, 2016 ), specifically examining regional differences in earthquake exposure across different birth cohorts ( Guo et al, 2019 ).…”

A study on the impact of health shocks on subjective wellbeing of middle-aged people and older adults—Evidence from China

“…To more accurately portray Chinese society, the CFPS employs implicit stratification and multistage probability sampling proportional to size ( 75 ). The CFPS baseline survey sample was drawn in three stages: county, village, and household, and it covered 25 provinces and districts in mainland China and 95% of the population ( 76 ). This gives us a more representative sample to investigate the influence of health shocks on the subjective wellbeing of middle-aged people and older persons.…”

Consequences of China’s special send-down movement on infectious disease control in rural areas: a natural experiment

“…Additionally, we analyzed the effect of prenatal exposure to send-down movement and infectious diseases by the strictness of send-down movement, i.e., the degree to which the send-down policy was implemented. More strictly implemented send-down cohorts were the individuals born in 1968–1972, and less strictly implemented send-down cohorts were born in 1973–1977, following similar methods of a previous study ( Ye, Zhu, & He, 2021 ).…”