Abstract
This paper examines the joint effects of the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and individual income on farmers’ psychological health, measured by happiness, life satisfaction, stress and loneliness. We employ a two-stage residual inclusion approach combined with a conditional mixed process model to analyse data collected from 7065 rural households in China. The econometric strategy addresses the potential endogeneity issues of ICT adoption and individual income and captures the possible interdependence between the two variables. The empirical findings reveal that both ICT adoption and high individual income are significantly associated with higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction, but are significantly associated with lower levels of stress and loneliness. Further analysis reveals that there exists a positive interaction effect between farmers’ decision to adopt ICTs and their income.
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Data Availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Wanglin Ma, upon reasonable request.
Notes
The information on both individual income and household income was collected by the CSS in 2015. We use invidual income rather than household income per capita in this study because the former provides a more direct reflection in its correlation with individual farmers’ psychological health performance.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the funding support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China Project (Grant No. 71903062) and Lincoln University commerce faculty seed fund project (INT5063).
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Zhu, Z., Ma, W. & Leng, C. ICT Adoption, Individual Income and Psychological Health of Rural Farmers in China. Applied Research Quality Life 17, 71–91 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-020-09879-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-020-09879-2