The Location Effect Of Happiness

Since the Reform and Opening up, our material life is improving. At the same time, the focus of us, is also changing from the pursuit of material to the higher level Spiritual experience, such as self-respect, self-actualization and satisfaction. With the developing of Positive Psychology, this focus tends to reflect on one’s subjective well-being, ie SWB, which comes from people’s integrity assessment based on his or her subjective standards. Subjective Well-Being is a comprehensive psychological index to measure the quality of people’s life satisfaction. In china, the imbalance of economic and social development is very obvious, especially between the urban and rural, first-tier cities, second-tier cities and third-tier cities, capital cities and non-capital cities, eastern region, middle region and west region. Furthermore, the concept of life and the cultural features for people living in different area are quite various, which lead to great difference in happinessThe happiness itself is subjective psychological feeling, also an expectation for the future. Because of its subjective and objective factors, when the real feeling for happiness meets the expectation level, people will feel happy, or they will get a low score for their happiness levels. As a result, there exist some irrational factors in the evaluation of people’s own happiness. This paper uses the questionnaire data of Chinese General Social Survey in2005and2010. It chooses the variables which can have an important effect on happiness, such as location income, ages, gender, education, health condition and so on. By using the Stata software for data analysis, it can get a conclusion whether the location factor could affect happiness or not.However, the purpose of this study is mainly prove residential location would affect the happiness of residents in different areas or not. The former results for the happiness of people living in different location is just a visual reflection based on the CGSS2005and CGSS2010statistical date without considering other factors which could also have a significant impact on the residents’subjective well-being. In other word, it fails to separate the impact of region factor. For example, the region factor is not the only reason which lead to the rural residents’ well-being lower than the city residents’. Other factors, such as lower income, poor medical conditions and poor educational conditions must also be taken into consideration. People in the eastern region feel happier than those in the central region and western region because of the higher income level, the better education condition and health condition are also due to the cause. So, this paper uses subjective well-being as dependent variable, the residential region as core independent variable, the natural logarithm of personal income, age, gender, education, political affiliation and marital status as control variables to make empirical analysis. In order to make subjective well-being comparison between the urban and rural, first-tier cities, second-tier cities and third-tier cities, capital cities and non-capital cities, eastern region, middle region and west region, we establish four econometric models. The empirical analysis shows that there are obvious relevant relations between happiness and residential location. The regression results show that rural residents’ well-being is higher than urban residents’; the happiness of people living in second-tier cities is higher than that living in first-tier cities, and third-tier cities; people living in non-capital cities feel happier than people living in capital cities; the residents living in the east are more happy than residents living in the middle and west. The results here are quite different from the former. Which lead to such regression analysis results? This paper will make deep research and analysis.In the end, this paper summarizes the regression conclusion. In addition, it gives some advice on how to improve the residents’happiness which may helpful to the decision making of local government. These suggestions include the promotion of economic growth, raising the residents’income, breaking the urban-rural dual structure, maintaining social equity, establishing a harmonious society, making overall district development and better city planning. The suggestions could be summarized as five aspects.We could find the innovation of this paper from the following two aspects: one is to review and analyze the different subjective well-being caused by the different location; the other is the combination of the macro and micro angle, which could help to make some suggestions on how to handle with the happiness difference results from different location.