Research That Matters (January 17 - 20, 2008)

Background and Purpose: This study measures the employment achievement of China's urban employed rural workers. Urbanization and rural-to-urban migration is widespread in the developing world, particularly in China, and is critical to its social and economic development. However, research on migrants' employment, a significant indicator of rural migrant workers' material well-being, is limited in its focus on descriptive and qualitative studies (e.g. Guest, 1998; Roberts, 2000; Roberts, 2001; Yang & Guo, 1996). Extensive evidence has additionally indicated that migrants' employment is complicated and can hardly be accurately measured through any single factor, e.g., salary. Instead, other factors such as job benefits, job status, job security, and employment consistency can also be significant indicators (Dolven, 2003; Gough, 2002; Lindorff, 1994; Nielsen et al., 2005; Roberts, 2000; Roberts, 2001; Smart & Smart, 2001; Yang & Guo, 1996). This study will add to existing literature by quantitatively examining the joint effects of four different factors on measuring the employment achievement among China's rural-to-urban migrants. Methods: The data for this study was randomly collected through an anonymous survey in China in fall 2006 from five large cities across the country in collaboration with Chinese research institutes. A total of 2509 employed rural migrants are finally involved in the survey. The study employed “four building blocks” approach (Wilson, 2005) in constructing and evaluating the measurement instrument. First, based on existing theories and research, factors influencing migrants' employment achievement were identified to establish a visual construct map where both respondents and responses sides are considered with an underlying continuum and are connected with each other. 89 items was then designed to measure migrants' employment achievement. After data collection, step-by-step analysis was performed using ConstructMap 4.3 to test the instrument's measurement ability including item fit and reliability/validity. Finally, the results were reflected back upon original construct map to inform future development. Results: The study results show an overall validity of the instrument in measuring migrants' employment outcome. Respondents are fairly distributed along a normal curve across the middle range of employment achievement levels. To further look at the employment achievement levels measured by individual items, the majority of the items centered in the middle range of construct where the respondents located, suggesting that they did differentiate the respondents as intended. Certain items demonstrate varying ability in differentiating respondents of different levels and the inter-relationships of each item in their measurement ability is not all consistent with those expected in originally construct map, suggesting the potential to improve the original construct map. Conclusions and Implications: The instrument developed shows fair good measurement ability in evaluating China's rural-to-urban migrants' employment achievement, which can benefit further studies on internal migration and employment. Two findings are interesting and deserve further examination in settings such as other developing countries. First, it is job status instead of job security that is more important to differentiate people with lower levels of employment achievement. Second, it is job-related benefits not income that singles out people with highest levels of employment achievement.