A comprehensive Study on the Changing Chinese Families

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The purpose of this study was to analyze Chinese families under the process of rapid economic growth. The framework was comparison of two axes : one is regional comparison (between eastern coastal region and inland region) and the other is community type comparison (between urban and rural communities).Five research sites were chosen : in the coastal region one city and two villages and in the inland region one city and a village. Field survey was conducted at two stages. Firstly, interview survey using structured questionnaires were conducted against randomly selected 2500 samples. Secondly, in-depth interviews were conducted against 100 samples purposively selected from the above samples. At the same time purposively selected samples of entrepreneurs families, migrant families and stem families who lack middle generation were surveyed, since they were assumed to show the rapidly changing aspects of Chinese families. Thus we succeeded in qualitative and quantitative analyses.Preliminary analyses shows various aspects of differences between regions and community types The difference of living condition between eastern coastal region and inland region is larger that that between urban and rural communities. Women's status in the family is notably higher among urban families and lower among rural families. It interests us that, as to family composition, one of the coastal villages shows the largest share of stem family while the inland village shows the largest share of nuclear family. Further investigation was left for us to analyze the family perspectives which shows little difference either between regions or community types.