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Abstract
This study goes beyond housing ownership and investigates how housing size, quality, and location affect the mental health of rural migrants in urban China. By using the RUMiC data, the results show that in addition to housing ownership, living space and housing quality are also significantly associated with the mental health of rural migrants. Moreover, with an increase in living space, the mental health of rural migrants who live in private rental housing tends to improve significantly slower than rural migrants who live in dormitories. Furthermore, housing quality and housing location do not moderate the effect of housing ownership on the mental health of rural migrants. This study highlights that it is important to go beyond homeownership and pay more attention to other attributes of housing when studying the mental health of rural migrants. Particularly, this study underscores that improving housing quality is an effective way to improve the mental health of rural migrants in urban China.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2018 Urban China Research Network (UCRN) conference. The paper was awarded the best paper prize of the doctoral students panel at the UCRN conference. The author would like to give thanks to Professor Fulong Wu, Professor Weiping Wu, and Professor Josephine Smart as well as the participants of the UCRN conference for their insightful comments on this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Shenghua Xie is Associate Professor in College of Public Administration at the Central China Normal University. He received his PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Turku, Finland. He has focused his research on urbanization in China with a specific expertise in issues of rural to urban migration, social integration of migrants, and social protection in Chinese cities. His papers have been published in international journals such as Cities and Health & Place.
Notes
1 The main policy document which guides economical and comfortable housing projects is the Management Rules of Economical and Comfortable Housing which is a jointly formulated policy by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, Ministry of Natural Resources, National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Supervision, Ministry of Finance, People's Bank of China, and State Administration of Taxation.
2 In Chinese language, people from the same place of origin refers to laoxiang, namely, people from the same village, town, or even more broader areas like county. Previous studies have documented that rural migrants from the same place of origin tend to reside in the same place, work for the same employer, and engage in the same occupation in cities (Zhang & Xie, Citation2013). Also, existing literature has revealed that laoxiang networks enable rural migrants to earn higher earnings, obtain jobs, and find residential places in cities (Ma & Xiang, Citation1998; Zhang & Xie, Citation2013).