Are Unhappy People More Likely to be Religious? Evidence from Chinese Rural Elderly

Abstract

With the rising of “religious fever” in China rural area, the authors inquire the reason why it happened. First, the authors explore the group characteristics which could affect both happiness and the religion belief of Chinese rural elderly. The authors analyze the micro-data of “thousand village surveys” data of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics by using Order Logit and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method. These results show that when the elderly people have the following features related to health such as: feeling psychological loneliness, not obtaining the good management of chronic disease in the village, and not being participated in new rural cooperative medical system are more likely to believe in religious in the rural areas. And the authors also find these Chinese rural elderlies who believe in religion are less happy than atheism elderly actually (by PSM). Believing in religion is not the solution and maybe the way these elderly resorts to when they encounter health problem.

Citation

Xia, L., Zhang, J. and Ma, X. (2022), "Are Unhappy People More Likely to be Religious? Evidence from Chinese Rural Elderly", Barnett, W.A. and Sergi, B.S. (Ed.) Quantitative Analysis of Social and Financial Market Development (International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics, Vol. 30), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 143-155. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1571-038620220000030010