Social Structure and Personality during the Transformation of Urban China: A Preliminary Report of an Ongoing Research Project.

This paper presents the theoretical rationale and research design of an ongoing study of social structure and personality in transitional urban China. The study is designed to be precisely comparable to recent studies in Poland and Ukraine during the early stages of their transformation from socialism to nascent capitalism, as well as to earlier studies of the United States, Poland when it was socialist, and Japan during more stable times. The paper also presents evidence that the dimensions of personality measured in the previous studies, and the questions used to measure those dimensions, are as appropriate for a study of urban China as they were to studies of the United States, Poland, Japan, and Ukraine, during times both of relative social stability and of radical social change; moreover, these measures of personality are essentially invariant for Chinese cities of differing degrees of wealth and privatization, and for both genders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]