Temporal, Spatial Distribution and Determinants of One-Person Households in China

Nearly 60 million people live alone in China now. As one of the fastest growing living arrangements in China, representing 14.0% of all Chinese family households in 2011, little is known about who they are, where they are, and what drove this increase. We take a historical look at the temporal and spatial distribution trends of the one-person household based on 1982, 1990 and 2005 individual-level Census and 1% Population Sample Survey data. In this study, we estimate a series of prefecture-level fixed effect regressions with data from 1982, 1990 and 2005 to examine the temporal-spatial trend of the changing prevalence of one-person households. We also conduct multi-level analysis with 2005 data to examine what contextual and individual characteristics contribute to an individual’s propensity to live alone.

Results show that socioeconomic development and internal migration are crucial factors for the increasing prevalence of one-person households in prefecture-level. There is an increasing spatial heterogeneity in that these households cluster in economically developed areas.  Although widowed individuals remain a substantial proportion of those living alone in China, we observe a sizeable increase in the prevalence of married individual who live alone.  The multilevel models with the 2005 data decompose the effects of socioeconomic development and internal migration into individual-level and contextual-level. Both out- and in-migration have significantly shaped the regional variation of living alone at both individual and contextual levels. However, the effects of socioeconomic development are positive at individual-level but negative at contextual-level suggesting that higher socioeconomic development may have led to higher living cost in these areas that may cast a negative effect on the propensity of living alone. In China, different age groups of those who live alone are motivated by different socioeconomic and cultural circumstances quite different from the cultural individualism emphasized in recent literature on Western societies.