Employment assistance policies of Chinese government play positive roles! The impact of post-earthquake employment assistance policies on the health-related quality of life of Chinese earthquake populations

Ying Liang () and Runxia Cao

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2015, vol. 120, issue 3, 835-857

Abstract: Sichuan is the province that is most affected by earthquakes in mainland China. The employment assistance policies have gained an important position in the reconstruction efforts of the government. And the health condition of survivors has long been a concern of humanities scholars. But most studies focused only on the psychological health of earthquake populations and not on their overall health status. This study used both original data and tracking data. The data analysis of this study was mainly based on comparative analysis of the two data. We conducted the first investigation in May and June and the second investigation in October and November. A total of 2,000 earthquake survivors from five hard-hit disaster areas (Wenchuan, Qingchuan, Mianzhu, Lushan, Dujiangyan) participated in the investigation. First, we give descriptive statistical analysis of the post-disaster employment assistance policies of Chinese government and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of earthquake populations. Second, we will explore the relationship between the eight domains of HRQOL of earthquake populations. Third, we also conduct confirmatory factor analysis to the medical outcome study short form 36 (SF-36). Finally we employ the structural equation modeling (SEM) to explore the effects of post-disaster employment assistance policies on the HRQOL of earthquake populations. The following conclusions are obtained from our analysis: (1) both the post-disaster employment assistance policies and SF-36 scales have good internal consistency. (2) The assessment of the employment assistance policies is relatively low. (3) The physical health and mental health of earthquake populations are not optimistic, and the HRQOL scores are low. (4) The SEM of the effect of employment assistance policies on the HRQOL of earthquake populations shows that the implementation of the seven domains of the post-disaster employment assistance policies of Chinese government is closely related. (5) The effect of different employment assistance policies of Chinese government on HRQOL differs. A few suggestions on how to improve the HRQOL of earthquake populations are given to according to our understanding of the effect of different policies on employment. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Earthquake populations; Post-disaster employment assistance policies; Health-related quality of life; SF-36; SEM; Sichuan earthquakes; Chinese government (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11205-014-0620-z

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