关键词: 多层级模型, 定序因变量, 生活满意度, 北京

Abstract:

Life satisfaction, a stable and long felling of life, denotes how well people thrive. In the last decade, scholars from different academic fields including psychology, sociology, geography, economy and so on have contributed a lot of research on the relevant topics. Besides, life satisfaction is also increasingly being seen as an essential element for the quality of urban development and government policy, therefore, followed by the scientific interests is the concern of administrative authorities who believe public policy should be about enhancing life satisfaction of the people. Although the highest rate of growth in GDP in Chinese urban, the economic growth did not promise an equal level of the improvement of residents’ life satisfaction.According to the previous research, there is little study that focus on life satisfaction from the perspective of Human Geography in China, especially lack of research that the influence of geographical unit effect on residents’ life satisfaction. Traditionally, single-level model was used in previous research to analyze the influence, which ignoring the similarity of individuals who living in same geographical unit and the clustering effect of groups. Worse still, single-level models do not fully exploit the hierarchical nature of geography data that are increasingly available and that can be utilized to provide more information about the role of geography at different spatial scales. In this aticle, we use ordered category response multilevel model to analyze that how the characteristics of sub-districts and community affect residents’ life satisfaction. Based on large scale survey in 2013 in case of Beijing, several conclusions are drawn as follows: 1) There are life satisfaction heterogeneity both at sub-district and community level, and the heterogeneity at community level is bigger than sub-district level. 2) Individual attributes also affect subjective well-being(SWB). In general, weak groups, such as low-income families, nonlocal hukou people and old people, are more likely be unsatisfied about their life. 3) Type of community has significant impact on life satisfaction. The closeness of community and high identity of residents in same community should largely responsible for this. Residents living in commercial housing are more likely feel satisfied about life than affordable housing and unit housing. Currently, diverse community is the inevitable choice for the rapid progress of urbanization as it provides more choices for urban families to access housing opportunities. However, community disparity also deeps residents’ SWB gap, implying that it should be given due attention to promote living environment of affordable and unit housing, further improve residents’ sense of well-being. Furthermore, in current metropolitan cities in China, it is the weak groups who are most unsatisfied about their life and always need help and concern from government most urgently. Because of institutional and economic factors, they are always excluded from the preferential policy provided to urban residents, and have few opportunities to access to good life in urban, especially for rural migrant workers.

Key words: life satisfaction, influencing factors, multilevel modelling, Beijing