"You lose confidence in yourself, I think, a little bit…" A qualitative study exploring the perceptions and experiences of the barriers and facilitators to wellbeing in women in work over 60 years old

Urban memory was originally more closely associated with memorial buildings, local chronicles, museums, old neighborhoods, and community narratives. As media forms such as short videos, WeChat official accounts, video accounts, Xiaohongshu, and local life platforms continue to enter urban life, urban memory has begun to be re-presented in lighter, more fragmented, and more everyday ways. The ) indicates that social media and short video platforms have become important channels for the public to obtain information, participate in public life, and access cultural content. In this context, urban memory is more likely to enter the public's information flow in an image-based, story-based, and interactive manner (; ). Stories of old factory renovations, historical images of Keyuan and Humen, life fragments of Guancheng old streets, struggle narratives of migrant workers, and personal memories of urban village renewal projects may all enter the information flow of migrants through social media. Thus, the city is no longer just a geographical space to be viewed, but also a socio-psychological field to be narrated, commented on, forwarded, and re-understood. In this study, social media urban memory narratives are understood as a specific type of place-based narrative content. They do not simply refer to all Dongguan-related online information, nor are they equivalent to city branding, local news exposure, or official city-image communication. Rather, they refer to digital narratives that connect recognizable urban spaces with remembered histories, cultural symbols, labor experiences, neighborhood life, and ordinary people's stories. Their distinctiveness lies in the combination of three features: memory orientation, narrative form, and experiential proximity. That is, such content presents the city through remembered or reinterpreted pasts, organizes information through stories and scenes, and links urban change with everyday life experiences that migrants may recognize or compare with their own. Dongguan provides a relatively representative research context for this issue. As an important manufacturing city in the Pearl River Delta, Dongguan has long had a large-scale inflow population. In the context of this study, the term “internal migrants” refers to individuals who have moved to Dongguan from other regions within China for work and life, encompassing both rural-to-urban laborers and cross-city professionals. These individuals are sometimes characterized as “new citizens” in Chinese urban governance discourse, but this paper uses “internal migrants” as the main analytical term in order to maintain consistency with migration studies and to avoid conflating governance terminology with the broader migrant population examined here. For many, the starting point for coming to Dongguan is job opportunities, not cultural identity; their entry into the city is usually through factories, rental houses, commuting routes, commercial districts, communities, and acquaintance networks. For this group, place attachment does not necessarily grow out of a grand urban image, but often comes from specific life details: a familiar intersection, a repeatedly passed road, a video telling the story of an ordinary worker, or a short film about the city's changes. Consequently, a question worth asking emerges: When urban memory is re-narrated through social media, is there an observable statistical relationship between it and migrants' place attachment, urban identity, and life satisfaction?