Linking history to individual lives: Introducing the mediational integrated capital model to examine pathway to life-course attainment

Zhilin Tang, Purdue University

Abstract

Background. Life course research has not provided consistent accounts of life effects of historical events. This points to the urgent need to examine the contingent processes that shape the links between the macrosocial changes and individual life chances. This study focuses on China's "Children of Cultural Revolution"—the generation whose life trajectories unfolded upon two most turbulent and far-reaching social events in China's modern history: Cultural Revolution and Economic Reform. In particular, among this generation we are interested in members of over-twenty- million urban "educated youth" who, from 1965 to 1979, were sent to rural areas to live and work. The purpose of this study is, first, to investigate whether and how the past experience of having been sent down to the rural areas during adolescence has affected the socioeconomic outcomes in their adulthood; second, to examine the pathways to attainment, the mechanisms by which unpromising beginnings led to opportunity and fulfillment instead to failure (and/or the reverse process occurs). Data and methods. The data for this study comes from China's Urban Life Survey in 1999 (N=4444). The analysis data is restricted to respondents who were born between 1946 and 1966 with urban origin as the risk group, which yields 2065 cases, of which 618 had been sent down. For analysis, multistage approach is employed. First, descriptive analysis and multivariate regressions are used for comparisons of socioeconomic and subjective outcomes between those with and without sent-down experience. Furthermore, Structural Equation Modeling is adopted to test the conceptualized integrated capital model as well as to examine possibly varied developmental trajectory between the two groups. Discussions. The present study has revealed long-term effects of China's drastic policy of sending millions of urban youth to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution on their lives. With the time spent in rural areas interrupting sent-down youth's education and delaying their accumulation of skills and work experience in the urban labor force, surprisingly, sent-downs have achieved parity with those who remained in cities in terms of their life chances three decades later. Income attainment is comparable between the two groups. Moreover, compared to urban youth, sent-down youth have even gained some leverage in educational accomplishments as well as an upward occupational mobility. Taking such supposed "anomalies" as the point of departure, the present study further argues and proofs the utility of including psychological attributes affected by historical events as an important contingent factor to examine the links between the macrosocial changes and individual life courses. The role of psychological development within individuals in addition to and in interaction with other dimensions of resource accumulation is further discussed in regard to examining adaptive resources in the relation between deprivation and human development.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Jackson, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Individual & family studies|Social structure

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