Data Collection
Data for this study were from the 2008 Societal Studies survey conducted by the Chinese National Survey Research Center. The survey employed a stratified sampling technique using China’s fifth census of 2000 as sampling frame. It included the 969 most crowded neighborhoods (ju wei hui in Chinese) in 125 cities across China. Each neighborhood was assigned a quota of households based on the population of that neighborhood as a proportion of the total population of all 969 neighborhoods. The researchers then selected 11,000 households randomly using the residence records in the sampling frame. One adult person was randomly selected from each sampled household to serve as respondent. Survey administrators visited each household after 18:00 on weekdays or after 14:00 during weekends and holidays to maximize participation rate. Of the 10,331 respondents, 10,045 (97.23%) provided their annual income and occupation information. Gender was evenly distributed (52.6% of respondents were male). The age of the respondents ranged from 18 to 62 (mean = 38.47, SD = 9.21). Most respondents were married (84.6%). Family size was quite small as 50.4% of respondents had one child (mean = 3.13, SD = 1.55). Average working hours per week was of 51.8 hours (SD = 15.51). Most participants had completed at least secondary education (90%) and had a full-time job (98.1%); 8.33% of the participants worked in the public sector and 12.36% were self-employed. The remaining (79.31%) worked in the private sector, and were representative of most major industries.
