Description

There is a growing body of research studies happiness. Longstanding literature report determinants of happiness, including but not limited to individual’s socio-demographic factors (e.g., age, gender & marital status), economic factors (e.g., individual’s labour income, retirement income, insurance income & household business income) and social cohesion/social capital (e.g., social trust & social fairness). Up-to-date researches indicate various findings on investigating how socio-demographic and economic factors affect individual’s happiness. Some multinational studies document that happiness is a U-shaped across age, and in general, being married, a good health can also positively affect individual’s happiness. However, research on happiness predictors has not shown consensus, such as having children, income, education, living in urban or rural areas, religion, the number of owed houses, and gender.

Dependent Variable

Happiness in China has interrelated with Chinese culture, and Chinese people’s happiness has been greatly affected by the three major philosophies in China, including Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. From the Confucian’s perspective, one’s happiness may attach to the overall needs of collective unit (e.g., Family). Taoism differs from Confucianism, and emphasizes adaptation, which refers as conforming to natural force, accepting fate with peaceful mind, and treating personal liberation as priority of all human desires. Based on Buddhism, doing physical exercises, mediating, doing charity and eliminating all human desires can all promote an individual’s happiness. Affected by the culture, Chinese people may feel happy when they are in calm and peacefulness, which is unlike westerners who may desire to acquire happiness when they experience excitements.

In China, people’s happiness is receiving increasing attention due to its unparalleled development between economic and happiness. A U-shaped pattern of happiness in China has been reported, and the happiness has declined from 1990 to about 2005, and recovery since then. Much research’s has been conducted to investigate factors that play roles the unparalleled relationship between China’s economic and happiness development. According to the literature, some social-economic factors have been proposed and studied. Similar to western studies, the happiness is U-shaped over age, and positively associates with income and health. Besides, determinants link to four life domains, involving work, family, social cohesion/social capital and living environment, also play roles in enhancing Chinese people’s happiness.

Leisure Activities and Happiness

Leisure activities offer individual opportunities to release pressure from life and work, socialize with others, improve self-worth, and meet life values and needs. In the past two decades, researchers have proposed theories to explain the relationship between leisure and happiness. For example, need-based theories suggest satisfy certain human innate needs can result in greater happiness, and they provide empirical evidence that socializing, family togetherness and physical fitness can explain 27% of the variance in happiness. Newman DB, et al. provides a more detailed framework to explain leisure engagement’s contribution to happiness. This framework contains five mechanisms, including detachment-recovery from work, autonomy (e.g., free selection and control), mastery (e.g., overcome challenges and develop skills), meaning (e.g., feeling purposeful and valuable) and affiliation (e.g., feeling of belonging), which interpret how leisure activity engagement affect happiness. Twilley provide empirical supports to most part of the framework. Although the results show no significant effect of leisure-based detachment-recovery and negative effect of leisure-based autonomy to happiness, leisure activity engagement has been regarded as an important part in contributing to individual’s happiness.

As the need-based theories and dramma model suggest, previous research find that engaging in some leisure activities can support an individual’s happiness but in different ways. For example, some leisure activities (e.g., meeting friends/relatives) involve social interaction and interpersonal communication, which could promote self-esteem, social capital and life satisfaction. Some leisure activities (e.g., reading) involve learning and development, which support self-fulfilment and make individuals feel more secure. Some researchers conducted one nation and multination research to study the relationship between leisure activity engagement and people’s happiness. They categorize leisure activities as active and passive, in terms of whether the activity involving energy expenditure or not they report active leisure activities (e.g., exercising, traveling & social interaction) are positively associated with happiness. Passive activities (e.g., watching TV, surfing online & playing video games) are found negatively affect the happiness. In some multinational research, affected by nation’s culture and social contexts, findings of the relationship of different leisure activity engagement and people’s happiness are variable. For example, Wei X, et al. report two intriguing findings as they find passive activities (e.g., watching TV & Internet surfing), rather than active activities (e.g., exercising, socializing & shopping) have positive relationship with Chinese people’s happiness which might be due to the culture and social contexts. In this study, we would explore how the frequency and different leisure activity engagement affect Chinese people’s happiness. We used fixed effect models to control the effects of entity and years. Meanwhile, some standard correlates of happiness, such as individual’s marriage status, education level, personal annual income, household registration type (Urban/Rural), gender, age, the number of owned houses were held as controls.