Social support via WeChat? Explorations of Chinese rural–urban women’s happiness

Wang, Linxin 2025. Social support via WeChat? Explorations of Chinese rural–urban women’s happiness. Social Sciences 14 (3) , 123. 10.3390/socsci14030123

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (303kB)

Abstract

Employing a social support perspective allows us to examine the experiences of migrant women in assembly lines using WeChat to explore the relationship between social support and their subjective well-being. Th paper takes advantage of the digital ethnography method to investigate Chinese rural–urban women using WeChat in Tianjin, China. Utilizing a snowball sampling approach to search for 47 interviewees, this study conducted in-depth face-to-face interviews. The research discovered that activities organized by companies, digital information, and virtual communication, to some extent, provide Chinese migrant women with social support, consequently positively influencing their subjective well-being. It is undeniable that the use of WeChat seems to conceal the inequality, imbalance, and many other issues behind this phenomenon. Even so, this discovery will help researchers investigate migrant women’s urban inclusion and mental health in the future.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Journalism, Media and Culture
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Start Date: 2025-02-20
Publisher:	MDPI
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	5 March 2025
Date of Acceptance:	26 November 2024
Last Modified:	05 Mar 2025 10:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/176623

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item