Abstract

The primary goal of this study is to identify disintegration and reconstruction of the family/kinship structure in the rapidly industrializing urban area, Seoul. For this purpose, detailed data about (1) the value related to the family and kinship (2) the family relationship, especially marital relationship (3) the attitude of divorce and remarriage (4) the characteristics of the social network (5) the family/kin rites and attitude about the rites are gathered. A total of 716 subjects completed structured questionnaires. Major conclusions of the study are as follows: Firstly, most of the respondents are found not to support familism and boy preference, and they show an ambivalence about the child value analyzed by concepts of the cost and reward. Secondly, most of the respondents perceive that marital relationship has been changed toward the direction of increased relative importance of wives' opinion in the decision making process within the family. However, they believe that husbands still have more power than their wives. Respondents also believe that parents have more power than their children. Thirdly, most of the respondents view divorce as an altemative to unhappy marriage. It was also shown that relatively few have negative attitude toward remarriage. Fourthly, the social network of the respondents is characterized by two distinct trends, namely, strong parent-child ties and narrowed kin relationship. Fifthly, the urbanization and the introduction of western life style have disrupted the traditional rites of passage. But ancestral rites serve to confirm family ties, especially the gathering of siblings to perform ancestral rites for parents. Therefore foreign element exist in parallel with pre-existing traditional elements.

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