This book empirically develops a new concept, "sense of gain". By addressing four interrelated and progressive questions, this book clarifies the conceptualization of the sense of gain, develops three kinds of psychometric-sound instruments for various research purposes, demonstrates the diagnosis function of the index, and explores the social influencing factors. The sense of gain can be conceptualized as a two-faceted (i.e., psychological wellbeing and perceived social development) and ten-dimensional (i.e., economic level, political rights, stylistic education, social livelihood, ecological protection, satisfaction, ability, target, friendly, happily settled) theoretical construct, which can categorize the general population into four categories. The level of the sense of gain can be measured by 70-item, 30-item, and 10-item instruments. A series of influencing factors, such as demographics, household type, population mobility, and socioeconomic status, were preliminarily identified. Future studies should focus on the development of a longitudinal nationwide database and systematically investigate the promotions and barriers of the sense of gain to further understand this kind of comprehensive individual and social wellbeing index.

Auteur

Wenjie Duan is a professor of social work in the Department of Social Work, Social and Public Administration School, East China University of Science and Technology. He obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Social Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong. He was appointed as Editorial Board member for Research on Social Work Practice and Journal of Evidence-based Social Work and Associate Editor for Frontiers in Psychology, as well as the reviewer of more than 30 peer-reviewed journals. He was awarded Ph.D. in advance and the Chow Yei Ching Graduate Studies Scholarship, the Top Honors for Ph.D., as the sole winner in the areas of Humanities and Social Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong. At present, he mainly engages in evidence-based social work with strengths perspective, social indicators and psychometrics, as well as quality of life promotion. He specializes in the combined emic-ethic approach to develop intercultural theory and measurements. Then,applying these theories and measurements to different contexts, conducting in-depth studies to clarify the internal mechanisms, constructing intervention programs at the individual, community, and society levels to facilitate the improvement of the quality of life, health level, well-being, and positive growth. The outcomes are published in SSCI journals such as Research on Social Work Practice,British Journal of Social Work,Children and Youth Services Review, Social Indicator Research, Journal of Happiness Studies, Quality of Life Research, etc. He has published 2 Chinese monographs (coauthored), wrote 2 chapters of the monographs in English and 2 chapters of the Chinese, published 64 SSCI papers, and 18 Chinese-SSCI journal articles. Among them, there was one highly cited ESI paper, 3 full-text reprinted papers by the Information Center for Social Science of Renmin University of China, and 1 full-text reprinted paper by Xinhua Digest (online version). The cumulative impact factor was 108.151, and the cumulative impact factor for five years was 153.523. The Google-based citation number was 1462, and the I10 index was 36.