关键词: 农民工, 代际关系类型, 代际团结, 潜在类别分析

Abstract: In the context of massive rural-urban migration, changing intergenerational relations have an important impact on welfare of family members of rural migrant workers. Typological methods provide a useful tool to depict complex and diverse family relations, yet there are few typological studies on diversity of intergenerational relations in Chinese rural migrant workers’ families. Using data from a survey of rural migrant workers in Shenzhen in 2013, this paper, employing latent class analysis, reveals four types of intergenerational relations in rural migrant workers’ families: tight-knit, near but emotionally-detached, distant but emotionally-close, and detached ties. The tight-knit tie, which is characteristic of the traditional extended family and of strong cohesion, is the most common type in rural migrant workers’ families, but it has been deeply branded with the mark of urbanization, reflecting continuation and change of traditional rural family relations. The distant but emotionally-close tie reflects the effort of out-migrant children who support their parents over a long distance, with parent-child emotion growing into an important new bond maintaining intergenerational family relations.

Keywords: Rural Migrant Workers, Type of Intergenerational Relations, Intergenerational Solidarity, Latent Class Analysis