Getting married, having children impact political news consumption, Zheng study finds
Forming a long-term partnership encourages television watching for political information while the arrival of a child inhibits such usages, according to an article co-authored by doctoral candidate Xia Zheng.
“Transitions in marital, parental, occupational status, and political news consumption in China,” by Jiawen Zheng of Nanjing University, Qi Chen of Changzhou University, and Zheng, appears in The Social Science Journal. It examines Chinese people’s behavioral changes in consuming political news via television and the internet as they correlate with changes in marital, parental and occupational status.
The paper analyzes two waves of data from the China Family Panel Studies. It adds to the existing research, primarily devoted to age, gender and education variables, and focuses on the life-cycle effect.
The authors found that:
- Having a long-term partnership and dissolving a partnership inhibit online political information use.
- Having children at home encourages online political information intake while inhibiting TV political information use.
- Transitioning from unemployment to employment fosters online political information intake.