The aim of this study is to identify the factors influencing school adjustment of bicultural children, especially to examine how family functioning has the moderating effect on school adjustment of bicultural children.
The respondents of the researc...
The aim of this study is to identify the factors influencing school adjustment of bicultural children, especially to examine how family functioning has the moderating effect on school adjustment of bicultural children.
The respondents of the research were collected through the purposive sampling method, and the research was proceeded with 171 elementary school students, age of 9-13 years old who are from bicultural family. The distribution of this research respondents indicated the similar distribution to the distribution of the children from bicultural family who are currently in elementary school. The average age of the respondents was 10.62 years old, mostly resided in Kyoung-Ki area, birthplace of mothers were highly distributed in Japan and Phillipine, and most respondents said that they are from above the average economic level. Also, the children use Korean as their major language with their family members and their fluency in Korean is high and they show high interest in their mother's country.
The key result of the research showed that bicultural children have high level of ability in school adjustment and low in handling stress in cultural adjustment. General characteristics that influence in school adjustment are level of fluency in Korean, interest in their mother's country, family's economic level; higher the level of fluency in Korean, higher the interest in their mother's country, and higher the level of economic class of the family, the better they do in their school adjustment. Looking at the effect of how stress in cultural adjustment influence in school adjustment, the research showed that the stress in the process of cultural adjustment which was the subordinate factor of cultural adjustment stress came up as a major variable in influencing school adjustment. Some of the important factors of the family functioning which influence school adjustment were ability of problem-solving and communication pattern; having the better ability to solve the problem and the better communication pattern among family members, the better they do in school adjustment.
This research tried to examine whether the family functioning has a moderating effect in the cultural adjustment stress of the bicultural children influencing school adjustment. As a result, the ability of problem solving among family members found to be the factor that has direct influence on school adjustment but, was not considered as a moderating effect, and only the affective involvement which was the subordinate factor of family functioning was found to be the moderating effect in the cultural adjustment stress of the bicultural children influencing school adjustment; within the condition that the cultural adjustment stress is high, if the affective involvement was low, they appeared to experience more difficulty in school adjustment. On the other side, if the affective involvement was high, appeared to do well in school adjustment. This result tells that if the members of bicultural family show interest in school life and interest of their children and get involved to sincerely understand and sympathize about what their children really want, bicultural children will be able to overcome and do well in school adjustment even if the cultural adjustment stress is very high.
Based on these research results, I want to present a direction in social welfare practice. Bicultural family program must be more activated than now to enhance the school adjustment ability of children from bicultural family. This bicultural family program should be operated as an integrated program that can boost the understanding and give more chance to experience about their mother's country. In addition to it, the research showed the need of providing more of well structured and individualized program to improve the children's ability to speak better Korean, because ability to speak fluent Korean is becoming very important factor in school adjustment. Also, family functioning of bicultural children came up as very important factor in school adjustment, especially problem solving ability became the direct factor that influence the school life and affective involvement had mediating effect as indirect factor that influence the school life. Therefore, more programs to improve better parent-child relationship and to activate parenting for mother and father are need to be offered to enhance the functioning of bicultural family. That means, we need parenting program for parents of bicultural family to understand and establish interest in their bicultural children's school life and their areas of interest. Family counseling(therapy) program is also needed to improve the communication skill between parents and children of bicultural family, and to seek out the answers to solve the problems that bicultural family might have.
This research has limitation in fully generalize the results, since the data was collected using purposive sampling method; There is possibility to demonstrate more of positive responses, because the respondents were collected through the organization that already has programs related to bicultural family. Also, the average age of respondents was relatively so low and they had tendency to have difficulties in fully understanding the questions that we obtained information from the respondents through the interview instead of survey, and there exists a possibility that the respondents provided more positive answers. Therefore, as more sustainable studies about bicultural children are done, I expect to see more solidified theoretical foundation about bicultural children and the translation of theories into practice should be more well structured in the future.
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