Chinese Journal of Sociology ›› 2022, Vol. 42 ›› Issue (6): 188-213.

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Window of Time and Trauma of Time: The Temporal Effect of Left-Behind Experience on Subjective Well-Being

LIU Zhijun, YANG Shuai, WANG Yan   

  1. Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University
  • Online:2022-11-20 Published:2022-12-29
  • Supported by:
    This research was supported by“Time Effect of Left-Behind Experience”(18ZJQN01YB) of Zhijiang Youth Project of Zhejiang Province and “Long Term Consequences of Left-Behind Experience and Its Mechanisms and Countermeasures”(71774138) of National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Abstract: Existing studies have mainly focused on the current and short-or medium-term effects of left-behind experience, but lacked sufficient attention to the long-term and time-window effects, as well as the repair of negative effects of the experience. From the perspective of life course, based on the 2018 China Labor Force Dynamics Survey(CLDS), this study analyzes the time effect of the childhood left- behind experience on the subjective well-being of adulthood in four aspects: cumulative length of left-behind, length after left-behind experience terminated, stages of being left-behind and different guardianship of left-behind. The results show that first, the experience of left-behind has a long-term negative impact on the subjective well-being of individuals, and shows a “double time effect”, that is, on the one hand, the longer the cumulative time of left-behind, the greater the negative impact in adulthood; on the other hand, the increase of the length of the post-left-behind period does not correspond to the increase of subjective well-being in adulthood. Second, the negative impact shows a reversed increasing characteristic of left-behind at age of junior middle school < at age of primary school < at age of preschool, indicating that the preschool stage is the“key window” affecting adulthood most critically. Third, regardless of the stage, single-parent and grandparent custody present negative impact on individuals with the former worse than the later. Finally, the propensity score matching method applied in the paper verifies the robustness of the impact of childhood left-behind experiences at all stages on individual subjective well-being in adulthood. This study confirms the enduring effects of childhood experiences on subjective well-being in adulthood, and reveals the duration effect, time window effect, and guardianship effect of childhood experiences.

Key words: left-behind experience, subjective well-being, Time Effect, Stage of Being Left-Behind, Custody Effect