A cross-cultural comparison between Korean and Korean-Chinese mother's parental satisfaction

초록

In the previous literatures, parental satisfaction has been found to be greatly influenced by the cultural values and history of the society. However, most of the studies in this area had examined the influence within the same culture and relatively little work has been done cross-culturally. The current study was designed to explore fundamental bases of parental satisfaction by comparing Korean and Korean-Chinese mothers who share the same cultural roots but live in societies with different ideology and values. Total of three hundred and fourteen mothers with children aged from three to six years participated in the study:- 160 Korean mothers from two cities in Korea and 154 Korean-Chinese mothers from two cities at Korean governing territories, called YanBian , in China. The Korean-Chinese mothers 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 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 were asked to answer a set of questions about their childrens temperament. The results showed that Korean-Chinese mothers seemed to be more satisfied with their roles as parents than Korean mothers. Additional analyses with socio-economic variables reported that both Korean and Korean-Chinese mothers satisfaction about spousal support were higher and their role conflicts were reduced when the household income was 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