WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

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WU H. –M. FELDMAN –JIN X. –LI S.
and old age support, as well as information about social support
networks and social discussion networks. Consistent with the
categories made by Van del Poel (1993), social support networks in our
study include instrumental support networks, emotional support
networks, and social contact networks. Social discussion networks are
of four kinds: concerning marriage and family, contraceptive use,
childbearing, and old-age support. The number of satisfactory
responses was 1,739. The average age of respondents was 31, 51
percent of whom were men, 67 percent were younger than 35, and 68
percent were ever-married. The average number of years lived in urban
areas was 6.78, and about 50 percent of respondents had lived in urban
areas for more than five years. Details of objectives, contents,
implementation and data quality of the survey are provided in our
research report (Institute for Population and Development Studies at
Xi’an Jiaotong University, 2005). Because of their low level of
education and lack of modern vocational skills, rural-urban migrants
often have to change jobs and residences frequently; it is therefore hard
to do follow up surveys on “floating population”. Thus our final data
are cross-sectional. The main objective of the survey was to study
attitudes and behaviours related to marriage, childbearing, old-age
support among migrants after migration, and the survey was not
specifically designed to study son preference among rural-urban
migrants. Some factors that may influence son preference, such as
social conditions in the city and an individual’s actual childbearing
needs, have therefore not been included in our questionnaire. Further,
attitudes and behaviours of permanent residents have not been
investigated. Comparison of fertility attitudes and behaviours among
rural-urban migrants with those of permanent urban residents is not
possible with the data from our survey.
3.2. Methods
Our analysis is divided into two parts. First, the status of migrants’
son preference after migration is analyzed, including attitude about son
preference and sex ratio of ever-born children. Attitude of son
preference among rural-urban migrants is assessed by “what will you
do when your first child is a girl”, which has been shown to be a
reliable measure of son preference in rural China (Li and Feldman,
1999). In addition, those whose first child is a girl are permitted to have
a second child in rural China. The government also encourages such
families to stop childbearing. To some extent, this indicator also reveals
the effect of the family planning policy on rural people. Based on the
data on migrants’ childbearing behaviours after migration, the sex ratio
of ever-born children is calculated, and the difference between the sex