Anning Hu

Fudan University · Department of Sociology

Social scientists have long been interested in the varying responses to a specific intervention, motivating the enterprise of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) analysis. Over the past five decades, the rapid development of HTE methods, from conventional multiplicative interactions in linear models to explorations based on machine learning techn...

Sociology is a science concerned with both the interpretive understanding of social action and the corresponding causal explanation, process, and result. A causal explanation should be the foundation of prediction. For many years, due to data and computing power constraints, quantitative research in social science has primarily focused on statistic...

Drawing on the Rural Socioeconomic Survey in China, we for the first time present descriptive information about Chinese citizens’ kinship ties to local government staff in rural areas, where around 40 percent of the respondents have at least one close relative in the family working in the local government. On average, such kinship ties have a signi...

This article investigates the association between cultural capital and the likelihood of attending an elite university within the Chinese socio-educational context. Drawing on data from the Beijing College Students Panel Survey, we show that (1) objectified cultural capital is negatively correlated with the likelihood of attending an elite universi...

Drawing on measures of diffuse and specific political support, this article proposes a typology of political trustors and investigates how it is related to authoritarian culture and perceived institutional performance. Using data from the Chinese Social Trust Survey 2011, we find that (1) compliants whose specific support and diffuse support are bo...

The consequences of social mobility have been a persistent theme on the research agenda of social scientists, but the estimation of the net mobility effect controlling for both social origin and destination confronts with the identification problem. This research 1) highlights the mechanical identification approaches deployed by the conventional me...

Prior empirical research on the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and meritocratic attitudes has yielded inconsistent findings. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining the heterogeneous relationship between SES and meritocratic beliefs and perceptions across community socioeconomic contexts in China. Using natio...

The sociological analysis of the mobility tables enhances the examination of the circulation mobility and helps one reveal the nuanced morphological patterns of mobility. In contrast, the economic analysis based on the measure of elasticity provides a handy way of covariate conditioning and statistically testing the similarities of mobility pattern...

Practices of intergenerational support are regulated by familial normative imperatives. Ancestor worship has been serving as such a normative force that sustains household eldercare in traditional China. Against the background of the concerted population ageing and reviving ancestor worship practices and beliefs in contemporary China, this study in...

This study examines the trajectories of hedonic and eudaimonic forms of happiness across college life. Analyzing the Beijing College Student Panel Survey, we find that: (1) Academic performance, extraversion, internship, and health status all have a significant and positive correlation with both types of happiness, while one fatalistic orientation...

This study elaborates the link between social trust and government trust by investigating how the extent of outwardness in one's specific trusting relation, as coalescence of trust strength and radius, relates to the varying trust in governments of different administrative levels. Using survey data collected in China, a country featured by the hier...

Cultural capital has been increasingly understood as acquirable cultural resources that concern a plural class structure and localized relational symbolic struggles. Against this background, the advantages of cultural capital can be conceptualized not only as the gap between the upper and the lower classes (the absolute advantage), but also as the...

The sociocultural approach to explaining the high trust of government in many societies emphasizes the trust-promoting cultural values and norms. Nevertheless, it is still elusive whether such cultural norms––often in the form of overarching, external, and monolithic “thick culture” ––affect trust in the governments of different administrative leve...

We evaluate whether greater reliance on test scores may reduce the extent of educational inequality by family origin as college graduates seek entrance to graduate school. In this article, we present a case study using survey data of colleges in Beijing, China, where students’ performance in standardized graduate school entrance examination (the GS...

Drawing on the sixth wave of the World Values Survey, this article examines the correlation between specific trust and subjective wellbeing. We find that (1) specific trust in different types of partners always has a positive correlation with happiness and life satisfaction; (2) the strength of this positive association declines from the socially c...

There exist three pension systems for urban older residents in China: the pension for government and public institutions (PGPI), the worker's old-age insurance for enterprise employees (WOI) and the urban residents’ social pension insurance (URSPI). This study examines how this multi-track pension system relates to older urbanites’ life satisfactio...

We examine the relationship between disadvantaged social status and adverse health outcomes within a context-contingent thesis of relative deprivation. We argue that the health effect of low relative status depends on contextual status homogeneity, which is measured as income inequality and group diversity. Applying mixed-effect modeling to the poo...

China’s large aging population poses grim challenges to eldercare provision. Against the background of withering traditional kinship-based eldercare and increasing significance of government-sponsored support programs, this study draws on data from the 2013 Chinese General Social Survey to investigate not only the correlation between the sense of s...

Over the past few decades, public opinion studies have paid increasing attention to the comparison of eastern and western religions, an endeavor that calls for a rigorous evaluation of empirical measures of religiosity for eastern religions. This study investigates the applicability to Chinese Buddhism of a measurement scheme based on believing, be...

Adult children are an important source of care providers for parents in a rapidly aging Chinese society, but we know little of which particular child is preferred by parents in time of need. Using the China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey, we investigate the factors associated with parental preference of caregivers and listeners among all his or h...

China’s aging society and the family-based model of basic aged care determine that children’s support for their parents directly affects the standard of living of the majority of the aging population. Existing theories indicate that in this era of social transition, the implications of filial piety have shifted from the traditional emphasis on the...

The aim of this paper is to examine whether and how rural residents’ educational attainment is associated with their self-rated health in China. Taking advantage of the National Exercise Facility Survey that was collected between December 2015 and March 2016, we find that educational attainment has a significant and positive correlation with self-r...

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by different vo...

The religious mobility of immigrants has rarely received a systematic investigation that separates the two mutually exclusive mechanisms: the structural shift that occurs due to an overall environment favorable to certain religions, and the exchange effect that occurs when people voluntarily flow between any pair of two religions. Chinese overseas...

Sociologists of religion have long been interested in the interaction between religious pluralism and religious vitality. Previous empirical studies approach this theme by drawing on data of denominational participation rates across geographical units, investigating the property of association between the quantity of one minus the Herfindahl–Hirsch...

As part of the national project of advancing citizens’ fitness and developing mass sports in China, public sports services (PSS) have been implemented rapidly throughout the country. However, how citizens of different social backgrounds evaluate PSS is still an open question. Drawing on the survey data from the Study of Community Sports in China co...

Background: Ancestor worship in China used to be an indispensable component of marriage and family life because it fostered an orientation toward perpetuating the family line. However, whether or not ancestor worship still matters in contemporary China is an open question. Objective: This article presents a comprehensive study of the association be...

Previous studies on major East Asian societies such as Japan and Korea generally fail to find a strong effect of cultural capital in educational inequality, partly due to the characteristic extreme focus on standardized test and curriculum. This study shifts attention to the horizontal stratification of education by investigating the association be...

Objectives: The aim of the study was to illustrate the immediate effect of the college education process (across college grades) on the strength of association between parental education and college attendees' health literacy. Methods: Cross-sectional analysis was conducted based on data from a random sample of students in one university in Shan...

The radius of trust – the width of one's cooperation circle – has been widely cited by scholars from various disciplines as a key factor in the production and maintenance of public good. However, the vagueness in its conceptualization, measurement, and analysis obstructs efficient communication between empirical works, impeding the accumulation of...

This study proposes an easy-to-implement approximation for primary and secondary effects in the study of inequality of educational opportunity by discretizing the measure of academic performance. Relative to the widely-used Erikson–Jonsson model, our method is not subject to the potential limitations that are associated with the parametric configur...

This study investigates the gender pattern of both downstream and upstream transfers between older parents and their children in China. Based on theories about the generation gap in the understandings of family norm and the heterogeneous effects of the social forces that encourage women to contribute more in elder care by generation, the author pro...

Despite the well-received detrimental effect of socio-economic inequality on generalized trust, the role of subjective inequality, as defined to be the joint outcome of one's perception of factual unequal social resource distribution and normative belief about the ideal state of inequality, is elusive, which constitutes a research gap, especially i...

The nexus between religion and mental health in the East has been understudied, where the coexistence of multiple religions calls for scholarly attention to religious identification. This article investigates the impact on self‐reported depression of an individual's identification with Christianity in a non‐Judeo‐Christian and religion‐regulating s...

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurring within groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners’ judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either est...

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurringwithin groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners’ judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either esta...

Although ancestor worship has been widely acknowledged as one of the most significant cultural traditions in Chinese society, information about its nationwide popularity and followers’ sociodemographic characteristics is still not clear. Taking advantage of the first nationwide survey on Chinese residents’ spiritual life, this study examines: (1) t...

Borrowing Weber’s dual-interest model and “switchman” hypothesis, this study uses survey data to analyze the internal driving force and diversity in the charitable giving behaviors of private business owners from Wenzhou, China. The study found that (1) the political and religious beliefs of business owners can have a positive influence on donation...

There are generally two fundamental approaches to conducting counterfactual decomposition in social scientific research, but their distinction is still elusive. This study makes contributions to the literature by (1) clarifying the rationale for the two counterfactual decomposition approaches within Rubin’s counterfactual causal inference framework...

Odds ratio (OR) and the educational Gini coefficient (EGINI) defined on a specific social grouping scheme can both be used to gauge educational inequality. In this study, we systematically review the scholarship that underpins the utilities of OR and EGINI and evaluate their properties across four research scenarios of allocating newly created oppo...

Drawing on nationwide representative data, we study the patterns of horizontal stratification of higher education in contemporary urban Chinese society, examining how college major, location, and ranking affect college graduates’ occupational income and the likelihood of assuming a managerial position. The results suggest that (1) college major dif...

This article reviews and comments on three major expansions of propensity score methods in recent decades. First, how to use generalized propensity scores to tackle multi-categorical or continuous treatment variables is shown in procedures of propensity score regression adjustment and propensity score weighting. Second, the counterfactual framework...

This study illustrates intergenerational religious mobility with the case of Chinese society. Using the quasi-symmetric log-linear model to separate structure mobility from exchange mobility, we examine the variation in religious identities between the reform era generation and their parents. Structure mobility results suggest that the encompassing...

In modern society, educational achievement’s impact on individual lives is reflected not only in economic benefits in the labor market but also in various “intangible returns.” Based on national data from the Chinese General Social Survey of 2010, our analysis of the urban- rural disparity and mediating factors in the health benefits of educational...

Most studies on the religion-science connection have been conducted in a Judeo-Christian context where other-worldly rewards are often emphasized. This research note examines how scientific orientation and scientific knowledge interact with people’s this-worldly oriented superstition by presenting a case study of school adolescents in urban China,...

Using data from the urban sample of the Chinese Household Income Project in 1988, 1995, 2002, and 2007, we examine the association between increasing educational homogamy and rising earnings inequality of married couples. Using methods of counterfactual decomposition and random mating, we reveal that, over the years, increasing educational homogamy...

In this commentary on the research note by Wang Xiaobing, Chengfang Liu, Linxiu Zhang, Yaojiang Shi and Scott Rozelle, “College is a rich, Han, urban, male club: research notes from a census survey of four tier one colleges in China,” I address several caveats in using the relative disparity index in assessing the extent of inequality in access to...

Drawing on previous literature and theoretical considerations, the authors identify six key independent variables related to popular religious belief and practice in mainland China: institutional religious affiliation, level of education, income, perspectives on inequality as a social problem, assessment of overall health, and rural residency. Usin...

Although the average enhancing effect of higher education on subjective wellbeing has been confirmed in many previous studies, we still know little about how such an effect may change in an era of higher education expansion. Drawing on representative data collected in urban China, this study illustrates a nonparametric analytical framework and high...

Drawing on pooled cross-sectional data collected in Taiwan, this research examines the age, period, and cohort effects on the trajectories of folk religions. We detect a temporal growth in Taiwanese folk religion from the early 1990s to the mid-1990s, followed by a downward trend in the 2000s. A slight decline of individual folk religion is confirm...

China has undergone a rapid expansion in higher education since the late 1990s. Drawing on a recently collected nationwide representative data, the current study makes contributions to the understanding of the health benefits of college education in urban China. Using propensity score matching to deal with potential selection bias, the results of t...

Drawing on a nationwide representative data from the Chinese General Social Survey 2010, this research examines the relationship between educational attainment and self-rated health in mainland China. It is shown that educational attainment can significantly promote an individual's self-rated health. Besides, the positive effect of educational atta...

Drawing on survey data collected in 2011, this study investigates the radius of generalized trust in contemporary China. Based on the results of the ordinary least squares and finite mixture models, we find the average radius of generalized trust in the urban population is wider than that of the rural population. In addition, on average, married pe...

Drawing on a recently collected nationwide survey in mainland China, this article examines the average level of generalized trust among urban Protestants. This is the first rigorous quantitative study addressing the relationship between religion and trust in the context of mainland Chinese society. Through propensity score matching, this study also...

This study investigates individual heterogeneity in the economic returns to higher education in urban China following large-scale higher education expansion. We draw on data from the urban section of two waves of the Chinese General Social Survey, analyzing a sample of 1022 individuals in total who (1) were aged between 25 and 32; (2) completed hig...

A remarkable expansion of secondary and tertiary education has been witnessed in mainland China in the past decades, resulting in changing returns to educational credentials. Using data from the 2003 and 2008 Chinese General Social Survey, this article examines (1) the changing returns to secondary and tertiary credentials in urban China from 2003...

Drawing on representative survey data collected in Taiwan, this study examines the effects on volunteering of Chinese folk religion. We find (1) practicing ancestor worship lowers people’s likelihood of donating to secular groups while local deity worshippers are more likely to donate money to religious organizations. (2) Sectarian group membership...

Religious economies theory predicts that in a deregulated religious market, well-organized religions will thrive, and loosely organized religions will struggle and decline in membership. This research (1) tests this hypothesis with representative sample data from Taiwan between 1990 and 2009; (2) contrary to religious economies theory, finds signif...

The revival of folk (popular) religion in China in the last three decades has been noted in many publications and documented in ethnographic studies. However, until now there has been no quantitative study that provides an overall picture of Chinese folk-religion practices. This article is a first attempt to draw the contours of Chinese folk religi...

The decline in perceived happiness within economic prosperity in Chinese society calls for further examination. In this research, we investigate the effect of employment in public sector work units on perceived happiness through the mediation of economic and social status relative deprivations. In the reform era of China, work unit is still an impo...