Yang Zhou

Objective: This study examines unmarried Chinese people's preferred characteristics of a spouse and how the preferences vary by gender and across socioeconomic groups. Background: Extensive research has attempted to uncover mate selection preferences, a crucial factor shaping who marries whom. Predominantly analyzing observational data, however, existing research provides only indirect inferences about individuals' mate preferences independent of structural opportunities in the marriage market. Method: This study employs a novel survey experiment, fielded in the 2021 Chinese General Social Survey, to directly examine unmarried individuals' mate selection preferences in China. We estimate conditional logit models to assess the relative importance of six characteristics in shaping hypothetical marriage candidates' desirability: income, property ownership, education, rural/urban origin, age, and appearance. Results: Both unmarried men and women prefer to marry a similarly‐aged urban‐origin property owner with a high income, good education, and attractive appearance, suggesting a gender convergence of mate preferences. Individuals' mate selection preferences also vary with their ascribed (rural/urban origin) and achieved (education) socioeconomic status, and mate selection standards are more relaxed among those over the mean marriage ages for their sex in China. Conclusion: Our study highlights the importance of directly examining mate preferences in clarifying the mechanisms of marital sorting and the value of survey experiments in family research.

Little is known about how health status considering both multimorbidity and frailty develops over time. This study aims to investigate joint trajectories of multimorbidity and frailty and examine their associated factors among older American adults.We used data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study (2011–2019). Fourteen chronic conditions were ascertained each year. Frailty was measured annually using the Fried frailty phenotype. Group-based trajectory models were fitted to identify joint trajectories of multimorbidity and frailty. Multinomial logistic regression model was adapted to examine the association of baseline characteristics with the trajectories. We identified six distinct joint trajectories of multimorbidity and frailty, including four concordant and two discordant trajectories. Compared with the Newly-developing condition and Constant non-frailty group, increasing age, low education, dual Medicare-Medicaid status, former or current smoker, mild or severe insomnia symptoms, and bothersome or activity-limiting pain were significantly associated with an increased likelihood of belonging to the other five groups with higher levels of multimorbidity or frailty (all P< 0.05). Multiple distinct joint trajectories of multimorbidity and frailty offer complementary evidence to the heterogeneous patterns in aging, as well as inform clinicians, policymakers, and researchers to develop targeted interventions and provide comprehensive care management in community settings.

Existing research has extensively examined the determinants of fertility attitudes and behaviors. However, with the primary focus on whether and when to have children, previous studies have overlooked a crucial dimension—who to have children with. This study innovatively employs the choice experiment method to examine the preferred characteristics of childbearing partners among the Chinese. We also estimate the partial utility and willingness to pay of different attributes of partners in people's fertility decision-making. We further explore the heterogeneities by gender, hukou (household registration) status, education, and birth cohort. Our results indicate that the following characteristics are preferred in ideal childbearing partners: youth, higher socioeconomic status, homeownership, better family background, and more attractive appearance. Compared to men, women place higher importance on income, family background, education, and homeownership. In contrast, men value physical appearance more than women. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that men's preferred characteristics in an ideal childbearing partner do not vary by hukou status, yet urban women have a stronger preference for partners with a better family background compared to rural women. The preference for highly educated partners increases with one's own years of schooling for both men and women, implying a strong tendency for educational homogamy in China. We did not observe substantial cohort changes, except that men born after 1990 place a slightly higher importance on physical appearance compared to other cohorts. Our results suggest that the choice of childbearing partners corresponds to the wider patterns of social stratification in China.

Applying sequence analysis methods to work trajectories recorded in the 2012 China Labor Force Dynamics Survey, this study examines the types of work trajectories in China’s urban labor market in three dimensions: employment status, organizational type, and work position. The findings suggest that along with the market transition, China’s urban labor market is experiencing diverse and complex job mobility patterns. This study identifies four types of work trajectories: the merit-based work trajectory, the blue-collar’s work trajectory in the private sector, the blue-collar’s work trajectory in state-owned enterprises, and the self-employed trajectory. These four typical work trajectories have significantly different influences on individuals’ attainment of socioeconomic status and elite status. This study sheds light on the microprocesses in status attainment by examining the role of work trajectories from a longitudinal perspective.

Objective: This study examines how household wealth accumulation varies by different types of hypogamy on the basis of couples' own and parental education.Background: Educational hypogamy (wives having more education than their husbands) is increasingly relevant in many societies, given the reversal of the gender gap in education. Prior research has studied how marital sorting on couples' own education shapes their individual earnings trajectories. Few have examined the implications of marital sorting on parental education for family‐level economic well‐being.Method: Using data from the 2010–2018 China Family Panel Studies and multilevel growth curve models, this study examined how household wealth trajectories over years of marriage differ by types of hypogamy. Hypogamy in the child generation (wives having more education), hypogamy in the parent generation (wives having more parental education), and hypogamy in both generations (wives having more own and parental education) were compared to hypogamy in neither generation (wives having neither more own nor parental education).Results: Hypogamy in either the child or the parent generation accumulated more total wealth and housing wealth than hypogamy in neither generation. Hypogamy in both generations experienced the fastest gains in total wealth.Conclusion: Hypogamy on the basis of couples' own or parental education is associated with more household wealth and faster wealth accumulation over years of marriage.Implications: This study sheds light on the long‐term implications of hypogamy based on the education of two generations for wealth stratification.

Subjective social status is an individual's perception of his/her position in the social stratum, and it shapes social inequality in a perceived way. By using the China Family Panel Studies and employing growth curve modeling strategies, this article examines the subjective social status trajectories of Chinese people between 2010 and 2018 and how these trajectories are shaped by objective social status. The empirical findings show that the distribution of subjective social status in each wave (2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018) presents a middle-class identification, which means that the majority of people tend to position their subjective social status at the middle level, while the overall trend in average subjective social status has increased over time. The results of trajectory analysis show that different objective socioeconomic status indicators have different effects on the baseline value and rate of growth in subjective social status, which suggests that the trajectories of subjective social status are influenced by multiple determinants in China. While education, income and political capital reduce the gaps between the classes in subjective social status over time, wealth and employment status enlarge these gaps and thus enhance subjective social inequality. This article highlights the gradient effect that wealth has on the dynamics of subjective social status and helps us to better understand subjective social stratification in contemporary China.

Various forms of empirical evidence suggest that parental socioeconomic status (SES) is strongly related to educational outcomes and many countries attempt to close achievement gaps among children. Parenting practice is one important mechanism through which educational inequality emerges across families with different SES. In this paper, we show that the class gap in children’s time use and academic achievements reflects parenting styles and parental practices stratified by parental SES by comparatively investigating the cases of China, Japan, and the USA, drawing on three sets of nationally representative longitudinal data. We find that for children aged 10–15 in China, parental SES has a strong impact on children's homework time and academic performance. Similar patterns are found in the results of 10–15-year-old children in Japan; however, homework time more weakly relates to the parents' education level. Moreover, restricting the samples to 14-year-old children and comparing the three countries, we find that the test score gap among parental SES is the largest in the USA; to fill the gap in math test scores between the first and fourth income quartiles, a sizable number of additional hours spent on homework are needed in the USA, compared to China and Japan.

Based on a comparison between labor markets in China and those in the USA and using data from the China Family Panel Studies and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper studies the level, distribution and socioeconomic patterns of job mobility in contemporary China. I first discuss the different social contexts in China and the USA that have generated distinct opportunity structures of job mobility. Differences in levels of economic development, cultural traditions and institutional arrangements help to shape different labor markets and job mobility patterns across the two societies. I argue that job mobility is not always as good as we thought. There is a duality of job mobility at both the individual and the societal levels. Second, I develop several indexes and use the percentile share method to analyze job mobility rates by different groups and their uneven distributions. Compared to the USA, I find that China has a lower overall level of job mobility, a more skewed distribution and a higher concentration of mobility in socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, such as the elderly, the less-educated and those of rural origin. The results demonstrate the importance of understanding the duality of mobility; that is, that mobility can be either upward or downward. In contemporary China, socioeconomically disadvantaged people may suffer downward job mobility.