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Article History

Received: 3 December 2024

Accepted: 8 September 2025

First Online: 17 October 2025

Competing interests

: The author declares no competing interests.

: This study is a secondary analysis of de-identified, publicly available data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). CFPS is a longitudinal survey of human participants administered by Peking University. In the early waves (including the 2010 baseline and the 2012 wave), CFPS operated under Peking University’s institutional review and project-level oversight in place at that time. In 2014, ethical oversight was centralized under the Peking University Biomedical Ethics Committee, which issued the unified approval number IRB00001052-14010 and has renewed it annually thereafter for all subsequent CFPS waves. The present study complies with the WMA Declaration of Helsinki and the CIOMS International Ethical Guidelines. The analysis used de-identified data only and did not involve any direct contact with participants. If required by the authors’ home institution, this secondary analysis falls under the category of exempt research (publicly available, de-identified data).

: Before each wave of the CFPS interview, an Informed Consent Form will be signed with the respondents. Participants aged ≥15 provided their own consent; legal guardians provided consent on behalf of minors (<15). All consent forms are archived at Peking University’s Social Science Survey Center with wave-specific identifiers. Consequently, readers will see that some consent dates (e.g., 2010) precede the issuance of the unified 2014 ethics approval number; this reflects the transition from earlier institutional oversight to the unified 2014 approval, rather than any deviation from ethical requirements.