Effect of occupational mobility and health status on life satisfaction of Chinese residents of different occupations: logistic diagonal mobility models analysis of cross-sectional data on eight Chinese provinces

BACKGROUND: Life satisfaction research in China is in development, requiring new perspectives for enrichment. In China, occupational mobility is accompanied by changes in economic liberalization and the emergence of occupational stratification. On the whole, however, occupational mobility has rarely been used as an independent variable. Health status is always used as the observed or dependent variable in studies of the phenomenon and its influencing factors. A research gap still exists for enriching this field. METHODS: The data used in this study were obtained from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). The study included nine provinces in China. The survey was conducted from 1989 to 2009.Every survey involved approximately 4400 families or 19,000 individual samples and parts of community data. RESULTS: First, we built a 5 × 5 social mobility table and calculated life satisfaction of Chinese residents of different occupations in each table. Second, gender, age, marital status, education level, annual income and hukou, health status, occupational mobility were used as independent variables. Lastly, we used logistic diagonal mobility models to analyze the relationship between life satisfaction and the variables. Model 1 was the basic model, which consisted of the standard model and controlled variables and excluded drift variables. Model 2 was the total model, which consisted of all variables of interest in this study. Model 3 was the screening model, which excluded the insignificant drift effect index in Model 2. CONCLUSION: From the perspective of the analysis of controlled variables, health conditions, direction, and distance of occupational mobility significantly affected life satisfaction of Chinese residents of different occupations. (1) From the perspective of health status, respondents who have not been sick or injured had better life satisfaction than those who had been sick or injured. (2) From the perspective of occupational mobility direction, the coefficients of occupational mobility in the models are less than 0, which means that upward mobility negatively affects life satisfaction. (3) From the perspective of distance, when analyzing mobility distance in Models 2 and 3, a greater distance indicates better life satisfaction.