A Cross Cultural Comparison of Korean and Korean-Chinese Parents' Parental Satisfaction

초록

Total of three hundred and fourteen pairs of parents with children aged from three to six years participated in the study:- 160 Korean parents from two cities in Korea and 154 Korean-Chinese parents from two cities at Korean governing territories, called “YanBian”, in China. The Korean-Chinese parents were mostly descendants of Koreans who had immigrated to China since the middle of the nineteenth century. Parental Satisfaction Questionnaires by Hyun (1994) were used to measure mothers’ and fathers’ parental satisfaction in five areas: (1) general satisfaction for being a parent, (2) satisfaction about parent-child relationship, (3) satisfaction about spousal support, (4) distress form role conflicts, and (5) satisfaction from support of children. In addition to general information about socio-economic status of the family, mothers and fathers were asked to answer a set of questions about childrearing behavior and their children’s temperament. The results showed that Korean-Chinese mothers seemed to be more satisfied with their roles as parents than Korean mothers, however in the case of fathers, parental satisfaction were similar in both groups. Additional analyses with socio-economic variables reported that both Korean and Korean-Chinese parental satisfaction increased and parental role conflicts reduced when the household incomes were higher. Interestingly, most Korean-Chinese mothers reported to be highly satisfied with spousal support whereas only highly educated Korean mothers seemed to be satisfied with spousal support. In addition, for child-related variables, Korean and Korean-Chinese parents’ parental satisfaction were not affected by their children’s gender or age but when they thought their children’s temperament was difficult, their role-conflict tended to increase.