Social Status and Subjective Well-Being in Chinese Adults: Mediating Effect of Future Time Perspective

Either objective or subjective social status is linked with subjective well-being (SWB) in a variety of ways. However, the exact mechanism underlying this relationship remains unknown. The present study investigates whether future time perspective (FTP) mediates the linkage of social status and SWB. A total of 3937 Chinese adults (M = 34.68 years; SD = 9.67) participated in the study. Pearson correlation analysis indicated the positive correlations between social status, FTP, and SWB. Stepwise regression showed that objective social status had a weakly linear effect on SWB, and subjective social status was more closely related to SWB than objective social status. The structural equation model showed that FTP functioned as a mediator in the relations between objective/subjective social status and SWB, which indicated that people with a higher objective and subjective status had high scores on FTP and those concentrated on future reported greater SWB. Overall, our findings do support the mediating effect of FTP in explaining the associations of two forms of social status and well-being. Implications of these results for understanding the connection among study variables were discussed.