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Article History

Received: 22 March 2025

Accepted: 24 November 2025

First Online: 13 February 2026

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: This study is a secondary analysis of de-identified, publicly available data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), a longitudinal survey of human participants administered by Peking University. In the early waves, including the 2010 baseline and 2012 wave, CFPS was conducted 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 this approval annually for all subsequent CFPS waves. The present study adheres to the principles outlined in the WMA Declaration of Helsinki and the CIOMS International Ethical Guidelines. This study relies on the CFPS database(publicly available, de-identified data) and involves no additional human participants; thus, no additional ethical review is required.

: For the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), written informed consent was obtained from all participants by trained interviewers immediately before each face-to-face interview during the fieldwork period of each survey wave. For the waves used in this study, the fieldwork periods were as follows: CFPS 2016: July 1, 2016–May 31, 2017. CFPS 2018: June 5, 2018–May 31, 2019. CFPS 2020: July 1, 2020–December 31, 2020. CFPS 2022: May 1, 2022–December 31, 2022. Informed consent was obtained during the corresponding fieldwork periods for each survey wave. Participants aged ≥15 years provided their own consent, and legal guardians provided consent on behalf of minors (<15 years). All signed consent forms, including the exact calendar date of signature for each respondent, are archived at Peking University’s Institute of Social Science Survey with wave-specific identifiers and are not accessible to secondary data users. Therefore, the exact signature dates of individual consent forms are not available to secondary data users. The project execution period aligns with the informed consent collection period for each wave. For further details on the informed consent process, please refer to the official CFPS WeChat public account. This study relies solely on the publicly available, de-identified CFPS database and involves no additional contact with human participants; therefore, no new informed consent procedures were required.