Meejung Chin

Seoul National University | SNU

Middle-aged adults who provide supports to both their parents and children – often referred to as the “sandwiched generation” – are at higher risk for poor mental health. However, within the Korean cultural context, where strong expectations for intergenerational financial support exists, may influence the well-being of individual’s who either fulf...

This study examines which traditional family rituals have survived among marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth rituals, focusing on gender and generational differences. In total, 1,319 adult participants were recruited for the survey, and this group comprised adults from the baby boomer generation (BB: born between 1955 and 1963), Generation X (born...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the synchronized time of dual-earner couples in Korea and whether the time use is related to the husbands’ and wives’ daily emotional experiences by using dyadic data. This study focused on the time use of the domestic domain, specifically housework and childcare activities on weekdays and weekends. It al...

The Family Education Guidance Service is a public service developed by the government to give guidance and service to parents on educating their children in China. Recently, the service has attracted increasing attention from scholars, as well as from the Chinese Government. To assess the current status of research on the Family Education Guidance...

As a family transits to their children’s school age, the role of working mothers as “parents” increases, and tension in their children’s education begins in earnest. This study aims to examine how the work-parenting conflict of working mothers with elementary children changes over time and to find out which factors affect the work-parenting conflic...

Elementary school students freely plan their own schedule during after-school time. Perceived time poverty varies depending on the way they compose the same hours. This study compares the time use of upper elementary students in 2009 and 2019 and examines the difference in time poverty according to the type of after-school time use. Time Use Survey...

This study aims to provide information for program development for single-person households delivered at local Family Centers. We conducted two focus group interviews with single-person households, one with center program participants, and the other with non-participants. The participant group consisted of six people in their 20s and 30s, while the...

This study aims to clarify the relationship between family policy and children’s quality of life through an international comparison and to determine which family policy factors contribute to children’s quality of life. The research question is “How can family policies be combined to improve children’s quality of life in terms of health and economy...

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the direct and indirect relationships among economic hardship, economic strain, emotional stress, and couple conflict for married Koreans during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we investigated whether these pathways were different between lower and higher socioeconomic status (SES) groups....

This study examined the experience of middle-aged women, centering on the home as the residence of never-married children. I conducted interviews with four such women in their 50s and 60s who had experienced the residential independence of never-married children within the past five years, and a variety of field texts were used as research texts. T...

The purpose of this research is to investigate how dual-earner couples spend time together in the family domain and how their time use is related to their satisfaction level of time. Couples' time use reflects couples' agreement and negotiation in family life, sometimes representing gender equality norms in their daily life. When dual-earner couple...

This study examined how dual-earner couples spend a day and whether each activity is related to the daily emotional experience.

The contemporary neighborhood literature discusses the complex relationships among neighborhood environments, social support, and parenting. Grounded in the Person-Process-Context-Time (PPCT) model, we examined how different sources of social support interact with Korean mothers’ perception of disorder in their neighborhoods, and if social support...

This study examined the impact of job demand and organizational culture on new task difficulties, burnout, and job satisfaction using a survey data of 145 family specialists in Healthy Family and Multicultural Family Support during the COVID-19 pandemic. We used the job demand-resources model and the competing values model to categorize the four di...

The main purpose of this paper is to discuss how COVID-19 has impacted Korean families. The economic well-being of Korean families has been threatened because many family members lost their jobs or earned reduced incomes due to the pandemic. COVID-19 substantially changed the work environment and has provided the momentum for the growth of flexible...

This study explores how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed family life and relationships as well as how these changes affect perceived stress among married men and women. This study investigated changes in family time use, household work, child care, leisure activities, income and expenditures along with relationships between spouses and children us...

This study examined the effect of parental achievement-oriented expectation on high school students’ depression and verified the mediating effect of peer relations on relations. Data were derived from the 7th wave (2016) of Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey (KCYPS), and 1,979 high school students were included. Descriptive statistics analysis,...

Smartphones are representative multimedia devices capable of various functions that have emerged due to the development of information communication technologies (ICTs). The popularization of smartphones has changed the way ICTs media is used; consequnetly, it is expected that smartphones will influence family life by changing family communications...

This research aimed at examining changes in seniors' media time in Korea. It has compared media time of seniors in two waves and affirmed that seniors' media time is steadily increasing.

This research examined when elementary students starts to have their own smartphone and how the smartphone use influences children's time use. As a result, it is found that the higher the parents' education level, the lower the birth order, the longer children spend time outside home, there is a higher percentage that children have their own smartp...

While a high prevalence of child neglect cases has been reported by Child Protective Services (CPS) in Western countries, child neglect cases reported to South Korea's Child Protection Agency (CPA) present different trends than those in Western countries. Nevertheless, child neglect is an understudied area within child welfare. Thus, a need exists...

The recurrence of child maltreatment substantiation among families served by South Korea’s Child Protection Agency has yet to be thoroughly investigated. This study explores the recurrence of child maltreatment substantiation and related risk factors using the administrative data from the National Child Protection Agency (NCPA) . Multilevel discret...

The structures, functions, and meanings of families are diverse among cultures and have changed over time. Diversity is an important characteristic of contemporary families across the globe. Substantial changes have also occurred in the domain of marriage. Marriage has shifted from an institution to a companionship relationship, and its symbolic si...

This study makes suggestions on the contents of home economics to form adolescents’ values of a healthy marriage and family. For this objective, family-related contents of high school home economics textbooks between Korea and the U.S. were comparatively analyzed using a qualitative interpretation method, based on the elements of a healthy family....

This study aimed to compare factors related to changes in perceived health status of Han Chinese (traditional Chinese) and Korean-Chinese (Chinese nationals of Korean descent) women after immigration to Korea. During summer 2013, a survey was conducted with 151 Han and 158 Korean-Chinese women married to Korean men. Most of the respondents reported...

This study attempted to assess the durability of the trend in increasing childcare time and to get some clues based on research findings to make efficient policy interventions in case there is a need to continue or reverse course for such trend. In doing so, a total of 9,668 diaries from the 2004, 2009, and 2014 Korean Time Use Survey were analyzed...

This study aims to better estimate the amount of time spent for child care and to understand the characteristics of time spent for child care among employed and non-employed mothers with children under age 6 by taking concurrent activities into account. To assess time spent for child care, I differentiate child care activities into three types: pri...

This study examined the factors that were associated with longitudinal changes for ten years from 2004 to 2014 in time spent on housework by married couples who had a preschooler as their first-born child. It also sought to figure out how much of such temporal changes were attributable to differences in the means on associated factors as well as to...

The authors explored different factors that were associated with mothers' and fathers' choice between two forms of parent–school communication: school briefing sessions and parent–teacher conferences. A total of 585 parents—295 mothers and 290 fathers from different households—who had at least one child enrolled in middle school in Korea were surve...

This study empirically examines how the nationality and marriage route of migrant women affect the probability of divorce in South Korea, Using data from 2012 Multi-cultural Families National Survey, 11,786 Asian migrant women who are currently married or ever married to Korean men after 1990 were selected for Cox Proportional Hazard Model analysis...

The purpose of this study was to investigate how work-family spillover differed by employment status of married women and to identify factors related to the differences. This study drew a sample of 332 self-employers, 181 unpaid family workers, and 1,053 wage workers from the 2014 Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families. It was found that...

In this study, we analyze how various social phenomena and problems are associated with familialism in South Korea and outline policy implications from these associations. Institutionalized familialism, a concept that contrasts with what Ulrich Beck diagnosed as institutionalized individualism in modern (Western) society, is embedded in the socioec...

The purpose of this study was to look into how married working men with a child younger than six years old spent their weekend time either alone or with their wives on housework, family care, and leisure activities, and to find out whether different types of time use brought about different levels of satisfaction to their use of time on weekends. F...

This study aims to examine how home child care allowance influences a mother`s choice of child care type. To accomplish this goal, we surveyed 432 mothers who had at least one child under 5 years old. The data were analyzed by frequencies, percentages, means and binomial logistic regressions. The results showed that unemployed mothers and mothers w...

This study investigated changes in family life cycle during the last few decades. The concept of family life cycle provides an analysis framework from a family developmental perspective. It allows to explore how macro demographic changes are translated into structural and developmental changes at family level. In spite of importance in family and d...

This study attempted to explore parents`perceptions on character and character education for their children using a focus group interview method. According to previous research, the concept of character consists of wholeness of three components: relationship, individuality, and morality. This study investigated how parents` perception differ from t...

This study attempted to explore how middle aged married men and women prospected a Centenarian society and what implications their prospect cast for family policy. We conducted focus group interviews with five groups in order to identify their subjective prospects on marital relations, parent-child relations, caregiving from family or institutions,...

This study attempted to explain how middle-aged married men and women prospected their family life in terms of their future coresident family members, caregivers, and residence, and what factors were associated with these prospects. The prospects reflected their realistic expectation rather than their preference based on their current life situatio...

Family life culture embodies the ways of thinking and behaving among family members in everyday lives. With a noticeable growth of multicultural families since 2000, there has been an inflow of other culture into the existing Korean family life culture. This new phenomenon signals a potential transformation of the family life culture in Korean soci...

This study focuses on the roles of family and parents as primary environments for character education of children and adolescents, examines surrounding micro and macro environments in a bioecological model, and explores parent support methods for restoring character education in family. For this study, we had interviews with 54 parents(44 mothers &...

The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of family-friendly community policy and child care policy on parents with young children. Particularly, two specific questions were addressed: 1) Were there differences in the perception of community family-friendliness among parents with young children in Seoul provinces? 2) Were there differe...

This chapter describes the sociohistoric context of Korean families and the policymaking process of family policy in South Korea (officially the Republic of Korea, Korea hereafter). Until very recently, Korean families, influenced by Confucianism, have been the primary safety net and care providers with little or no assistance from the government....

This study attempted to examine whether there is a relationship between parental stress and the accessible and mobilizable social capital of mothers raising young children by the mothers' employment status. The sample included 284 employed and 287 non-employed mothers who have children younger than the age of 5. Three research questions were as fol...

Using data from the 2009 National Survey on Multicultural Families, we examined the factors associated with the level of life satisfaction among migrant wives in South Korea. Separate analyses were conducted for the four major ethnic and national groups of migrant wives in Korea: Chosun-jok (Korean Chinese), Han Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipinas....

This study aims to find the association between community scales and perceived community family-friendliness among parents with young children. Communities were identified into three groups: metropolitan, small and medium-sized cities and rural, according to the degree of urbanization. The data were drawn from a sample of 1,038 parents who had at l...

This study aimed to find the association between geographic proximity and program participation at a Healthy Family Support Center (HFSC). Drawing demographic and geographic information from the participant list at a local HFSC in Seoul for the period 2009 to 2011, this study calculated the geographic distance from the individual residence to the c...

This study attempted to investigate school participation experiences and the need for a school-participation leave for employed parents. A school participation leave is a paid or unpaid leave that guarantees workers to take time-off for school participation regarding children`s educational purposes. We reviewed cases of school participation in othe...

We provide a comprehensive review of family policy in South Korea (Korea hereafter) for international readers. Alarmed by recent social and demographic changes, the Korean government has started to establish explicit family policies from the mid 2000s. These policies have signified a symbolic attention shift to family matters in the history of soci...

Food assistance programs are an integral component of the public assistance safety net for the working poor, but many families do not use these programs when eligible to do so. In this paper, we use linked administrative data from the Illinois Integrated Database (IDB) to examine the patterns of nonparticipation in two food assistance programs—the...

Using a sample of 7,656 children observed over a three-year period in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we document the proportion of time children spend in various living arrangements and the number of transitions among them. We focus on four types of living arrangements for children: (a) living with a married mother; (b) core...