Browsing by Subject "South Korea"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    College students’ and counselor trainees’ perceptions of a psychologically healthy person: a comparative study on cultural values between the United States and South Korea.
    (2012-08) Yon, Kyu Jin
    The definition of a psychologically healthy person varies depending on changes in personality or counseling theories. Several common features—such as independence and autonomy—appear to describe the psychologically healthy person in the Western mental health field (Pack-Brown & Williams, 2003), reflecting personality and counseling theories based on European American individualism. European American values of psychological health, however, may not be entirely applicable to other cultures or countries, because one’s cultural orientation and values influence one’s understanding of well-being and what is ideal (Suh, 2000). The purpose of this study is to explore college students’ and counselor trainees’ perceptions of a psychologically healthy person and perceptions of certain cultural values while examining for potential differences between the United States and South Korea. United States participants included 200 undergraduate students and 103 graduate students in counseling psychology programs in the Midwestern United States. Korean participants included 241 undergraduate students and 119 graduate students in counseling psychology programs in Korea. The study used four different versions of the survey: a counselor trainee version and a college student version in both English and Korean. Each survey consisted of two different parts. The first part was comprised of the Asian American Values Scale–Multidimensional (AAVS-M; Kim, Li, & Ng, 2005) and the independent Self-Construal Scale (Singelis, 1994). The second part was an open-ended questionnaire which asked for participants’ perceptions of psychological health. A two-way MANOVA was performed with SPSS to examine differences in perceptions of Asian cultural values with the five subscales (i.e., Collectivism, Conformity to Norms, Emotional Self-Control, Family Recognition through Achievement, and Humility) of AAVS-M by nationality (United States vs. South Korea) and profession status (college student vs. counselor trainee). A two-way ANOVA was performed to examine differences in perceptions of individualistic values by nationality and profession status. The qualitative data was analyzed using qualitative content analysis (Morgan, 1993) with principles of inductive analysis (Patton, 2002) and Consensual Qualitative Research (Hill, Thompson, & Williams, 1997) to find themes in participants’ answers for open-ended questions using Nvivo software. The MANOVA revealed significant differences in perception of Asian cultural values by both nationality and profession status. The interaction effect of the two independent variables was also statistically significant, indicating that the nature of the difference between counselor trainees and college students varies in the United States and Korea. The ANOVA revealed significant differences in the perception of individualistic values by both nationality and profession status. The interaction effect was also significant, indicating that American counselor trainees perceived individualistic values in a more negative light than American college students, while Korean counselor trainees perceived individualistic values in a more positive light than Korean college students. As a characteristic of a psychologically healthy person, 8 domains (personal and self, interpersonal relations, social norms, affect, cognitive-behavioral, purpose in life, coping, absence of mental illness) and 29 themes emerged as a result of qualitative analysis. Thematic differences between the United States and Korea as well as college students and counselor trainees were identified. The results help us understand cultural value differences as well as impacts of counselor training in the United States and Korea. The findings suggested that counselor trainees in both the United States and Korea should be aware of their potential tendency to devalue Asian cultural values in their clinical work. The greater value differences between Korean college students and Korean counselor trainees particularly raised needs to develop culturally relevant counseling models and training in Korea. Suggested implications for training and practice of counseling in cross-cultural situations will be elaborated upon in detail.
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    Intimate encounters, racial frontiers:stateless GI babies in South Korea and the United States, 1953-1965.
    (2010-06) Park, Bongsoo
    This dissertation explores the policy implications of statelessness by examining G.I. babies, born of non-marital sexual relations between U.S. soldiers in South Korea and Korean women between 1953 and 1965. Using English and Korean language documents about adoption and immigration of stateless GI babies, my work shows that statelessness reveals a racially exclusionary vision of national belonging that shaped citizenship policies of both nations. The GI babies' presence challenged the myth of racial purity and confounded racial categories in both nations. The dissertation seeks to elucidate some limits of Cold War racial liberalism informed by humanitarian concerns for abandoned Korean war orphans but helped maintain racially exclusionary strategies on citizenship conferral that made the children stateless.
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    Mother America: Cold War Maternalism and the Institutionalization of Intercountry Adoption from Postwar South Korea, 1953-1961
    (2016-01) Lee, Shawyn
    In 1953 an armistice was signed suspending the conflict of the Korean War, a three-year long civil war between what is now the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) (Cumings, 2010). Casualties and the wounded numbered well over a million (Halberstam, 2007). Of those who remained in South Korea were hundreds of thousands of widows and children (Korean Institute of Military History, 2001). Many of the children were mixed-blood, born of Korean mothers and fathered by U.S. servicemen. Because of their mixed parentage, they were oftentimes abandoned, unwanted (Burnside, 1956). Mounting publicity of the poor, helpless “waif” was used to implore the American public to come to the rescue of these desperate children (Oh, 2012). Historian Christina Klein (2003) argues that it was felt that intercountry adoption could strengthen foreign relations between the U.S. and South Korea. It became acceptable and expected that American families would welcome mixed-blood Korean children into their homes, thus symbolizing American prosperity and security. Social welfare agencies played a major role in shaping and formalizing intercountry adoption practices in the aftermath of the Korean War. Numerous scholars, many of them Korean adoptees, have investigated the origins of Korean adoption. They have examined the same time period and utilized the same archival material as this study. What their research has in common with the present study is the critical interrogation of the longstanding dominant adoption narrative of children’s best interests served by humanitarian rescue and American benevolence. However, for as significant a role that social work played in formalizing Korean adoption practice standards in the 1950s, there currently exists no research that centers the activities of the profession with respect to Korean adoption. Using historical research methods situated within a maternalist and social constructionist framework, this study undertook a critical analysis of social work child-rescue efforts in postwar South Korea from 1953 to 1961 as embodied by one international social welfare agency: the American Branch of International Social Service (ISS-USA). This social work organization established and institutionalized intercountry adoption practices in the 1950s in its efforts to save mixed-blood Korean children orphaned by the Korean War. The American Branch became the premier expert on international adoption beginning in the 1950s. Its practice standards are still used today. Content analysis, informed by critical discourse analysis (CDA) and historical discourse analysis (HDA) methods, was conducted on primary source documents of ISS-USA. This archival collection is housed in the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota. Findings revealed both how ISS-USA set up a system of formalized adoption standards, and the extent to which maternalist ideological values influenced by Progressive Era maternalism placed thousands of mixed-blood Korean children into the embracing arms of “Mother America.” First, in order to relieve the emergency situation of the many needy children in postwar South Korea, ISS-USA developed a formalized system of intercountry adoption procedures through what it called case conference by correspondence, whereby everything from policy monitoring, practice methods, research, and adoptions were discussed and established through detailed letter writing between ISS-USA social workers, their foreign correspondents, and local and state welfare organizations. Second, in what I call Cold War maternalism, I expanded Progressive Era maternalist ideologies that established specific notions of proper motherhood as belonging to privileged white, middle- and upper-middle class Christian women to a national level. Cold War maternalism suggests that given the patriotic pronatalist, anti-communist contextual reality of 1950s America (May, 2008), by deeming American parents as suitable “mothers” for Korean children, in essence, the United States came to be seen as the best “mother” for South Korea and the many mixed-blood Korean children left after the war. Findings from this study provide another critical perspective of the Korean adoption origin story, but uniquely contribute to this growing body of research by critically examining social work’s central role in establishing intercountry adoption standards. Implications for social work research and practice include more focus on critical indigenous research methodologies, the importance of understanding historical aspects of the profession, and the consideration of historical trauma in current social work practice with intercountry adoptees.
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    Motivations for providing and utilizing grandmaternal child care for employed mothers in South Korea.
    (2009-08) Lee, Jaerim
    The purpose of this study is to construct a substantive theory that explains why grandmothers and employed mothers choose grandmaternal child care in South Korea. The data are gathered from 42 in-depth, individual interviews with 21 pairs of employed mothers, who have at least one child younger than elementary-school age, and their mothers or mothers-in-law, who have provided child care on a daily basis for their grandchildren. The grounded theory analysis identifies five main concepts: (a) love and (b) responsibility as the grandmothers' motivations for providing child care for their grandchildren; (c) expectations, (d) reliance, and (e) trust as the mothers' motivations for utilizing grandmaternal child care. The grandmothers decide to provide child care based on altruistic love for their adult children and a sense of responsibility for parental support, especially when they perceive that their financial support for their adult children is insufficient. The mothers expect to rely on the grandmothers for child care, both inevitably and expediently. Their trust of kin care and distrust of non-kin care show their dichotomous perspective of kin versus non-kin. The core category, bilateral familism supporting gender roles, is developed as the final integrative step of grounded theory methods. The core category suggests that the interests of both paternal and maternal grandmothers are subordinated to those of their adult children and the children's families in a way that sustains gender roles in their extended families. This study also discusses questions and dilemmas that grandmothers and mothers raise and encounter when they decide to choose grandmaternal child care. The grandmothers' children-oriented motivations of love and responsibility conflict with their individual desires. The mothers constantly ask whether they should leave the labor force to become stay-at-home mothers or not, and whether they should have another child or not. Their reliance on grandmaternal child care has an important impact on their answers to these questions. The policy suggestions of this study include (a) making child care leaves and reduced working hours as possible options, (b) improving the quality of day care, and (c) promoting trust in the day care system based on its enhanced quality.
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    Nostalgic for the Unfamiliar: US-Raised Koreans and the Complexities of ‘Return’
    (2016-06) Suh, Stephen
    Described by scholars as the relocation of diasporic descendants to an ancestral homeland from which they have resided away for most if not all of their formative lives, ethnic return migration has increasingly served as the foundation for the scholarly expansion of research on diaspora, transnationalism, nationhood, and ethnicity. I situate this dissertation within this growing body of literature by focusing on the life histories and migratory narratives of US-raised Korean ethnic return migrants (or ‘returnees’). The ethnic return migration of US-raised Koreans serves as a compelling case study for a few reasons. For one, US-raised Koreans represent a substantial portion of the returnee population in South Korea, trailing only Korean Chinese (or joseonjeok) in sheer numbers. What differentiates the ethnic return migration of US-raised Koreans from other diasporic Koreans, however, is that they relocate largely as highly educated, middle-class professionals, thus arriving in South Korea with relatively elevated levels of human capital and socioeconomic privilege. Furthermore, their decisions to relocate to an unfamiliar ancestral homeland stand at odds with social scientific research documenting the economic and cultural assimilation of later-generation Asian Americans. Drawing on data collected from ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth qualitative interviews with Korean American ‘returnees’ living in South Korea, this dissertation addresses the following questions: 1) what factors contribute to the ethnic return migration of diasporic descendants, especially among US-raised Koreans? And 2) given the weak ties that ethnic return migrants typically have with their ancestral homelands, how do these ‘returnees’ fare in their new environments? In examining these larger questions, each chapter of this dissertation endeavors to explain how the practice of ethnic return migration is intricately connected to and influenced by social factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, identity, globalization, and Empire. Taken as a whole, this project provides a nuanced and intersectional take on the practice of ethnic return migration—illustrating how a seemingly personal practice is deeply informed by and informant of larger social forces that span across multiple geographic and temporal contexts.
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    The Queer Threat: National Security, Sexuality, and Activism In South Korea
    (2018-06) Gitzen, Timothy
    This dissertation is about the recent neoliberal, bottom-up practices of “national security” in South Korea, where citizens interpret their daily lives through the language and discourse of national security and contribute to the production of threats. I demonstrate how national security threats also emerge from within the nation-state, often in the margins and treated as national others. The experiences of gender and sexual minorities represent the complexities of these margins, national othering, and internal threats. Focusing on what I call the queer threat, I argue that the relationship between the nation and security is changing to account for emerging margins and Others in the nation. This change results not only in shifting practices and discourses of national security, but ultimately marks modes of governance that take aim at the queer threat. Specifically, the Korean state and anti-LGBT protesters bring gender and sexual minorities into unexpected relations with “threat figures,” including North Korea, Muslims, and viruses. The amalgamation of such threat figures produces unintended relations of national security, themselves queer productions, that come to form new matricies of social relations and meanings that disrupt enforcement of national security law. I argue the queer threat is dangerous because it is a threat to the nation and a threat to the institution, logics, and practices of national security.
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    Toward Integrative Securities Market Manipulation Regulation in Korea: Why does Korean regulation rely heavily on criminal enforcement? Should it change? Theory, Evidence, and Recommendations
    (2022-07) Jung, Youchull
    Although the securities market in Korea has developed rapidly since 1950 after the Korean war, the Korean securities market regulation to prevent market manipulation began in earnest with the enactment of the Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act of Korea in the 2000s, although the market in Korea has developed rapidly since 1950 after the Korean war. The Securities laws and regulations of Korea are very similar to that of the U.S. However, the enforcement against market manipulation heavily relies on criminal enforcement. This prioritization of criminal prosecution over administrative and civil enforcement makes it difficult for Korea to protect investors, especially in the post-Morrison world where market manipulation may migrate from foreign markets to Korea. Is future reformation of market manipulation law needed in Korea? Historically, the model of Korean securities laws is Japan’s, and the Japanese securities law benchmarked the U.S securities law. Therefore, the core anti-market manipulation law of Korea is almost identical to the U.S securities laws. However, substantial differences between the markets and enforcement history made Korean enforcement quite different. In Korea, the securities law’s primary enforcement tool is criminal prosecution. Civil enforcement by securities market regulators is scarce in Korea, and a class action by private investors is tough to bring. Using this criminal enforcement mechanism against foreign market manipulators is almost impossible in practice. The enforcement system, which heavily relies on criminal enforcement could be problematic, especially in the post-Morrison world. Cross-border consistency of civil, administrative, and criminal enforcement is critical to protect investors against the market manipulator who seeks enforcement arbitrage between countries after the U.S. Supreme Court Morrison decision applied U.S. securities laws only to transactions inside the U.S. This dissertation will examine various options for regulatory enforcement reform in Korea that would build on Korea's distinctive institutions and enhance administrative, civil, criminal securities regulation mechanisms against market manipulation.