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Cumulative Risk and Subjective Well-Being Among Rural-to-Urban Migrant Adolescents in China: Differential Moderating Roles of Stress Mindset and Resilience

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Abstract

Migrant adolescents are exposed to a variety of risk factors that threaten their well-being. However, previous studies have often focused on one or several factors separately, ignoring the cumulative effect of risks. The current study adopted the cumulative risk (CR) model and examined the deleterious effect of CR on the three indices of subjective well-being (SWB) among early migrant adolescents in China. We further explored the moderating role of resilience and stress mindset on the above associations. A sample of 234 early migrant adolescents (45.7% girls) completed self-reported questionnaires in two waves (2016–2017), and the mean age of valid participants was 11.49 years (SD = 1.16) at T1. The multiple regression results indicated that CR negatively predicted adolescents’ life satisfaction one year later. Moreover, high resilience and a more stress-is-enhancing mindset buffered the deleterious effect of CR on the emotional components of SWB. Specifically, the negative effect of CR on positive affect was reduced as resilience increased, whereas the adverse effect of CR on negative affect was attenuated by holding a more stress-is-enhancing mindset. The present findings suggest that CR is a useful predictor for multiple risk factors to which migrant adolescents are exposed and that it has a robust effect on later SWB. These findings also contribute to a better understanding of the moderating roles of resilience and stress mindset to aid future intervention programs.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all the children, parents, and teachers who participated or contributed to this project.

Funding

This research was supported by the Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Science Research Project (18YJA190003), the Program for Innovation Research in Central University of Finance and Economics, the National Basic Research Program (973 Program) (2015CB351702), National Natural Science Foundation of China (31871143) and Beijing Municipal Philosophy and Social Science Foundation (15JYC029).

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Correspondence to Silin Huang.

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Jiang, Y., Ming, H., Tian, Y. et al. Cumulative Risk and Subjective Well-Being Among Rural-to-Urban Migrant Adolescents in China: Differential Moderating Roles of Stress Mindset and Resilience. J Happiness Stud 21, 2429–2449 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-019-00187-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-019-00187-7

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