What makes rural teachers happy? An investigation on the subjective well-being (SWB) of Chinese rural teachers

Through an interdisciplinary lens, this study proposes a multi-dimensional conceptual framework for analyzing rural teacher subjective well-being (SWB) and examines it with survey data from rural teachers across 29 counties in 10 provinces in mainland China. The results demonstrate that an array of factors significantly impact rural teacher SWB, including gender, age, administrative position (in the individual dimension), and marriage (in the family dimension), as well as class size, wages, and professional training (in the school dimension). More prominently, compared with absolute wages, rural teachers’ perception of relative wages is far more important. Additionally, rural teachers in administrative positions tend to have a higher SWB, which demonstrates their needs to be involved in school management. Some policy implications for China and other developing countries are also provided.