Despite the vigorous activities of study on the married immigrant women with the recently in creased international marriages and multicultural families of Korean society, we don’t seem to have paid much attention to the troubles and stress with the ...
Despite the vigorous activities of study on the married immigrant women with the recently in creased international marriages and multicultural families of Korean society, we don’t seem to have paid much attention to the troubles and stress with the elderly people in the country who might have never met those foreign women in their lives but still have to accept them as their family members.
In this study, we will focus on the difficulties met by those rural grandmothers in the process of forming the multicultural families after accepting foreign women as their daughters-in-law to identify the difference between satisfactions of those foreign women and their mothers-in-law regarding their relationship, and the Acculturation stresses felt by these two groups. By identifying the variants affecting those stresses refrained from the Acculturation, this study aims to suggest the foundational information for welfare policies to help integrate the regional communities through a sound organization of multicultural families.
In this regard, the specific questions we should ask in this study are set forth as following.
1. Is there any difference between satisfactions of those foreign women and their mothers-in-law regarding their relationship, and their Acculturation stresses, subsequent to both sides’ socio-demographic and Acculturation characteristics?.
2. Is there any observable difference between satisfactions of those foreign women and their mothers-in-law regarding their relationship, and their Acculturation stresses?.
3. What are the variant factors affecting the Acculturation stresses felt by the rural elderly and foreign daughters-in-law?.
For this purpose, we have conducted surveys for 125 and 250 rural elderly and their foreign daughters-in-law respectively who live in Taean-gun or Seosan city. SPSS Win 15.0 was used for the data analysis as well as statistic methods including the technical statistics, reliability analysis, t-test, ANOVA, multi-regression analysis, etc.
The main results of the study are as follows.
First, 76 (60.8%) of all elderly women respondents said they were in good communications with their daughters-in-law; and 53 (42.4%) elderly women said they didn’t understand the culture of the mother country of their daughters-in-law. This result indicates the elderly women tend to be frequently engaged in lingual or non-lingual communications with their daughters-in-law while not understanding the cultures of the latter’s home countries.
The average age of the foreign daughters-in-law was 31.3; in marriage years, less than years was the most prominent by 45 (36%) and those who have achieved the Korean citizenship were only 85 (32%). In terms of the reasons for deciding to marry Korean men, the most prominent response was the desire to live in Korea by 40 (32%) while those who expressed their satisfactions with the relationships with their husbands were 84 (67.2%).
Second, the result of observing the factors came down to three regarding the satisfactions with the relationship between the elderly women and their daughters-in-law including trust-, empathy- and communication-wise satisfactions. And the Acculturationstress were divided into two factors including those from social relationship and cross-cultural adjustments.
For the satisfactions with the relationship between the elderly women and their daughters-in-law, first, the foreign daughters expressed the highest satisfactions when their fathers-in-law were alive, their mothers-in-law were 70 years old or less, and the daughters and mothers were staying together. Higher satisfactions were also found in those cases the foreign daughters were high school graduate or under, the daughters responded they married because they loved, they have been married less than 3 years, and they didn’t have any Korean friends. Second, when the elderly women were 70 years old or less, those mothers who were more agreeable to the cultures of their daughters’ home countries showed higher satisfactions. When the daughters were high school graduate or less, those responses including marriage driven by love, less than 3 years of marriage, 1-2 times of phone calls to their families back home, no Korean friends, and normal or higher performance in Korean writing were connected to higher satisfactions.
Third, in the mothers-in-law who were 70 years old or less and the middle or high school graduate women, normal or higher performance of the daughters in Korean writing resulted in higher satisfactions with communication.
In the stress from the Acculturation, first, those elderly women who couldn’t manage their own lives from the illiterate were more stressed out from the social relationship adjustment. In the daughters-in-law of college graduate or above, their stress from the social relationship matter were higher when their marriages were set mediated by a regional body, communication was challenging, they were unsatisfied with their relationship with their husbands, they were from well-off families, and their current living standards are lower than the previous one back home.
Second, in terms of the stress refrained from the difference between hetero-cultures, the group of elderly women didn’t show any significant difference across all the variant factors in statistics while the group of daughters-in-law whose ages were under 35, who were college graduate or above, didn’t have communicational capability, have no overseas local friends, were not able to speak, read or write Korean felt more stress.
Fourth, as a result of observing the difference of Acculturation stress and satisfactions with the mother-daughter-in-law relationship between the foreign women and mothers-in-law, only in the stress from social relations did the foreign women represented a high level compared with those of their mothers-in-law.
Finally, the results from the regression analysis for identifying the factors impacting the Acculturation stres
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