TITLE:
Expectations for the Future Life of Floating People in Mega-Cities: A Study of In-Migrants in Beijing, China
AUTHORS:
Lei Hu, Shengnan Liu, Zhiqiang Yan, Yishuang Liu
KEYWORDS:
Expectations for the Future Life, Floating People, Migrants, Life Course Stage, Utility of Life, Mega-Cities
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.11 No.9,
September
22,
2020
ABSTRACT: This paper aims to contribute to the theorisation of the expectations for
the future life (EFL) of floating people whose
household registration books (hukou) are
not registered locally in China’s mega-cities. Although the EFL of many rural-urban
migrants is explicit, the EFL type of other floating cohorts such as educated migrants and the formation mechanism
of EFL of floating people are much less well understood. We argue that EFL
is a person’s pre-judgment or estimation of living
conditions in the future based on his/her perception of current human well-being or utility of life and its
main concern is whether he/she expects to live in the mega-city in the future.
Based on the social production functions (SPF) theory, three types of EFL for floating
population are identified by using data collected from in-depth interviews with
30 Beijing’s migrants. This paper reveals that the EFL of floating population is
formed by comparing their current actual utility of life with the “normative utility”
in the specific life course stage, which is the life utility that people should
have in their specific life course stage expected by the society. Finally, these
findings are checked out that the theoretical saturation has been reached by applying
another 9 copies of transcripts of interviewees.