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This study provides new evidence on how the growingly significant digital life shapes Chinese adolescents' cognitive and mental health outcomes based on their gender, parental education, and geographical location. Using the China Education Panel Survey, a nationally representative survey following 12–15‐year‐old students in 2013 and 2014, and individual fixed‐effect models, we find that more time spent on the Internet is associated with higher self‐reported depression scores. This negative impact on mental health is more substantial for girls, those with less‐educated parents, and those living outside the city center. The link between Internet use and cognitive development is almost null. Time spent online negatively affects Chinese young adolescents' subjective well‐being but has little impact on their cognitive development. The link between Internet use time and subjective well‐being also depends on gender, parental education, and the geographical location of those adolescents. The heterogeneous impacts of Internet use time offer crucial new evidence to the multiple dimensions of the digital divide among adolescents in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intergenerational families play an important role in providing informal care and support. However, how the intergenerational living arrangements shape the time allocation of young couples remains unclear, and a more comprehensive analysis, where downward support and upward support are distinguished, is needed. Using the "2008 Chinese Time Use Survey" and the seemingly unrelated regression, we document how paid work time, housework and adult care time, and childcare time differ for working-age couples who live with none, relatively young, and relatively old parents. We find that the direction of support changes according to the age of the coresident parents. Compared with those who do not live with parents, couples who live with relatively young parents spend less time on housework and adult care, and those who live with relatively old parents have less paid work time, more housework and adult care time, and those rural wives living with elderly parents even spend less time on childcare. These findings highlight the importance of distinguishing the direction of help for studying intergenerational families and the high time cost of adult care in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Hong Kong, extended households are declining while households with helpers are increasing. More and more couples resort to hiring helpers instead of living with elderly parents to outsource domestic work. Currently, it is not clear whether elderly parents and helpers would have the same impact on couples' time use. To fill this gap, the study examines couples' paid work time and domestic work time, as well as the gender gap in time use in different household types (i.e. couple-only households, households with elderly parents, and households with helpers). It uses the couple data from the first wave of Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics in 2011 and conducts the inverse propensity weighting with regression adjustment (IPWRA) analysis. The results show that couples' total domestic work is reduced to a greater extent in the helper household than that in the elderly-parent household. But this difference disappears if couples live with relatively younger, healthy, and retired parents. Although the impact of younger, healthy, and retired parents and hired helpers would reduce couples' total domestic work time similarly, they are different in the sense of "help for whom": hired helpers reduce the gender gap in paid work time and domestic work time, mainly by influencing wives' time use; elderly parents reduce couples' domestic work time in a less gendered way, favoring both husbands and wives. Elderly parents and helpers could reduce couples' domestic workload more or less, but whether gender equality is promoted through outsourcing is worth more attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents trends in educational assortative mating using samples of the 1981 to 2011 Hong Kong population censuses/by-censuses, with a particular focus on specific education groups and the Hong Kong-mainland China cross-border marriages. Results show an overall declining trend in educational assortative mating, which is driven mostly by the great increase of intermarriage between those with associate qualifications and those with lower secondary or less levels of education. Growing number of cross-border marriages is also accompanied by the substantive decline in educational homogamy for women from mainland China in recent years. It implies that immigrants from mainland China are more likely to exchange education for the Hong Kong permanent residency by marrying spouses with less education in Hong Kong in later periods. These findings suggest that a general declining trend in educational assortative mating does not necessarily indicate an increased openness of a society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]