This study sets out to examine the referencing patterns of two key policies in South Korea, the Free Year Program (FYP) and the High School Credit Policy (HSCP). Classic reference countries US and Finland were frequently cited in the HSCP sample while less cited references such as Ireland, Sweden, and Denmark appeared for the FYP. In many cases, referenced countries were linked to a distinct set of themes across policies. The active and widespread practice of referencing in Korea is demonstrated by the large proportion of external references at the start of each policy cycle for the FYP and HSCP as well as the wide range of reference countries spread across multiple themes. Our study demonstrates how the same borrower country (Korea) can develop a repertoire of varying reference societies depending on the specific policy to legitimize domestic pursuits.

The purpose of this study is to examine stereotypes related to gender and socioeconomic status among college students in Korea (N= 488) where values, gender norms, and paths to success are rapidly changing. Each respondent read a vignette about a hypothetical student whose gender and socioeconomic status were manipulated, and was asked a series of question regarding the hypothetical student’s personal qualities, hopes for going and living abroad, current achievement, and future educational and employment success. We found salient SES differences but very few gender differences. High-SES students who possessed qualities valued in Western countries (tolerance, self-expression, imagination) were more likely to be seen to succeed academically and employment-wise, have more experience and desire to study abroad, and ultimately have more agency in their daily lives. Traditionally positive qualities associated with East Asian countries (independence, hard work, thrift, determination/perseverance, feeling of responsibility) were attributed to low-SES students.

Despite the widespread education reform discourses attempting to alleviate high-stakes examination pressure and narrowly test-driven education systems in East Asia, none have been as systematic and drastic as the Free Year Program (FYP) recently implemented in South Korea. The FYP provides middle school students with a year-long reprieve from examinations during which they can pursue other activities outside of the rigid test-oriented curriculum, exploring their career paths, free from the pressures of taking the midterm and final exams. In this article, we explore the contradictions raised by the discourse promoting the FYP within the broader national ‘Happiness Education’ framework. The FYP frequently references foreign cases, and articulates a national imaginary caught in between multiple competing agendas: the cultivation of a modern neoliberal subject in pursuit of their own happiness versus a collective nationalistic agenda in pursuit of global competitiveness, and multiple competing Western-inspired and domestic education discourses.

Did growing up as singletons (only-children) convince young adults born under China’s one-child policy of the superiority of singleton status and therefore the desirability of not having more than one child? This article draws on interviews with 52 childless newlyweds in Dalian, China, to help answer this question. We found that far from convincing them of the superiority of singleton status, the feelings of loneliness experienced by singletons in childhood and adulthood have convinced most of them that it is better to have a sibling than to be a singleton and thus it is better to have two children instead of one. Moreover, interviewees who did have siblings tended to corroborate singletons’ beliefs about how valuable a sibling can be in both childhood and adulthood.

This mixed methods study investigates how perceptions of gender inequality can positively predict credentialist attitudes and beliefs for women based on a survey of 488 college students from six universities with an ap- proximately equal proportion of men and women, and follow-up interviews with 18 of these respondents in 2018-19. 11 men and 7 women were interviewed. The findings suggest that women are more likely to value credentials in the face of discrimination at work because they believed credentials could help them overcome their gender disadvantage, catch up with men, and minimize their risk of failure, as education was perceived to provide equal opportunities for men and women.

Countless meta-analytic studies document the relation between parental involvement and achievement, but they mostly include studies conducted in the United States where parental involvement is framed as a policy issue. This is the first meta-analytic study focusing on East Asian countries characterized by high achievement levels, a comparatively standardized education system, and no policy encouraging family–school relations. A meta-analysis of 15 studies retrieved from an exhaustive search of the literature reveals a positive association between parental involvement and achievement. The strength of the relation was highest for academic socialization, followed by home involvement and school involvement, similar to previous meta-analyses.

Despite the multiple meta-analyses documenting the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and achievement, none have examined this question outside of English-speaking industrialized countries. This study is the first meta-analytic effort, to the best of our knowledge, to focus on developing countries. Based on 49 empirical studies representing 38 countries, and a sample of 2,828,216 school-age students (grades K–12) published between 1990 and 2017, we found an overall weak relation between SES and academic outcomes. Results for attainment outcomes were stronger than achievement outcomes, and the effect size was stronger in more economically developed countries. The SES-academic outcome relation was further moderated by grade level and gender. There were no differences in the strength of the relation by specific SES measures of income/consumption, education, and wealth/home resources. Our results provide evidence that educational inequalities are wider in higher income countries, creating a serious challenge for developing countries as they expand school access.

Previous meta-analyses found a positive association between socioeconomic status and achievement in the United States, but none have attempted to synthesize the effect size in East Asia despite the accumulating research documenting this relationship. This study revealed a moderately positive overall effect size between SES and achievement in East Asian countries, comparable to the results of prior U.S. meta-analytic studies. These numbers were higher than expected in a centralized, standardized, and differentiated East Asian education system. A critical review of our total sample of 77 studies revealed a mixed picture. While half omitted any discussion of differences, the SES-achievement relationship tended to be described as weaker in East Asia, but strengthening over time and becoming increasingly similar to that observed in Western industrialized liberal economies. Wealth and achievement displayed non-linear negative associations in China, raising the need to revisit social stratification processes and their interaction with education in East Asia.

Large-scale rural-urban migration in China has left rural schools with large proportions of left-behind children whose parents are away working in the city. This has a huge impact on family-school relations and poses a burden on teachers. This study draws on 42 interviews with teachers working in two rural schools. This article argues that teachers’ negative narratives about antagonistic family-school relations are driven by the gaps between their culturally embedded traditional models of family-school relations and the reality, with implications for the expanded role of schools and that of grandparents as caregivers. This article further discusses the implications of these findings for rural schools and draws heavily on Western models of family-school relations in a comparative perspective.

Empirical studies focused on cultural capital only emerged since the 2000s in South Korea. This article is the first to conduct a systematic review aiming to shed light on how the theory of cultural capital has been applied in South Korea. Our main goal is to understand: how the cultural capital–students’ achievement association in South Korea differs from research in western industrialized contexts; and how cultural capital has been defined, and which dimensions have been highlighted as core elements of social reproduction in South Korea. Based on an examination of both quantitative and qualitative studies published since 2000, our analysis suggests that, contrary to the focus on the highbrow culture or classed-based parenting practices in western literature, the institutionalized striving for upward social mobility through education and a popular desire to acquire globally convertible cultural capital is key to unpacking the notion of cultural capital in the South Korean context.

A few popular explanations attempt to argue for a weaker relationship between socioeconomic status (SES), parental involvement (PI), and achievement among Asian Americans compared to their white counterparts: Asian American students’ Confucian culture, strong motivation for upward mobility as immigrants, unique forms of parental involvement different from European Americans, and ethnic social capital. However, there has not been a single synthesis up to date empirically testing whether the effect size for SES and/or PI and achievement is actually weaker among Asian Americans across the body of accumulated scholarship. In this review, we found that quantitatively, the SES-achievement relationship was null for Asian Americans while it was positive for PI and achievement. The current scholarship revealed several key problems. In spite of the intuitive and appealing cultural arguments put forward emphasising Confucianism and immigration optimism, our review points out that these arguments have weak empirical support, and are too generic to be convincingly applied to Asian Americans without any distinction by ethnicity or generation. Furthermore, the parental involvement measures used did not effectively capture Asian American parents’ behaviours. Our review suggests a new comprehensive model better integrating the Confucian and immigrant optimism explanation, developing culturally appropriate measures of PI, distinguishing ethnic variation within Asian American groups, and including a nuanced view on how and whether the explanations hold across generations.

This article examines how Chinese citizens perceived the relationship between wealth and achievement among their former middle school classmates. It draws on a survey of 503 respondents in their late twenties and early thirties (who have been followed since 1999, when they were eighth or ninth graders in Dalian City, China) and on interviews with 60 of them. Most believed their former classmates from “poorer” families “studied better” than those from “wealthier” families. Interviewees elaborated that wealthier classmates were more likely than poorer classmates to lack motivation, have poor study habits, and be distracted by material pursuits. Interviewees also suggested that parental involvement was a key factor in shaping achievement, with more involved and educated “poorer” parents’ children doing better than children of “wealthier” business-owner parents who were too busy to get involved in their children’s education. Among these young adults, associations between wealth and achievement differ from those documented in Western

societies.

In this article, we examine how a cohort of urban youth born under China’s one-child policy have developed flexible gender identities through their childrearing aspirations and educational and occupational narratives, choices, and trajectories between 1999 and 2014. Drawing on surveys of 406 respondents conducted in 1999, 2012–2013, and 2013–2014, and interviews of 48 of those respondents in 2011–2014, we argue that our female research participants were more able to produce flexible gender identities than their male counterparts, and that China’s new market economy increasingly rewards youth who are flexible enough to adjust to rapidly changing circumstances, an approach more compatible with the flexible gender identities produced by young women than the more rigid gender identities produced by young men.

Accumulating evidence points to the unique contributions fathers make to their children’s academic outcomes. However, the large body of multi-disciplinary literature on fatherhood does not address how fathers engage in specific practices relevant to education, while the educational research in the United States focused on parent involvement often excludes fathers. There is no theoretical framework up to date explaining the gendered nature of parental educational involvement. How and why might fathers’ involvement differentially influence children’s achievement from mothers’? In this article, based on a review of existing research locating school involvement as a major area of difference between fathers and mothers, I propose a revised model describing the sources of father involvement drawing on Hoover-Dempsey and Lamb’s models of parent involvement and fathering explaining why fathers and mothers might differ over school involvement.

This study is the first to systematically review and synthesize the qualitative scholarship published since 2000 examining parental involvement in developing countries (n=16). Contrary to the large focus on micro- and mesosystem aspects of parental involvement in the current literature, studies conducted in developing countries tend to additionally expand on exo- and macrosystems. This meta-synthesis emphasizes collective outcomes as an important goal in developing countries, and highlights the potential contributions of family-school-community partnerships. Furthermore, Epstein’s U.S.-centric framework might be less relevant in the developing world due to differences in policy contexts despite its widespread usage.

This article draws on surveys (N = 406) and interviews (n = 48) of graduates of a middle school in Dalian City, Liaoning Province, China, who were part of the first generation of children born under the one-child policy that began along with China’s economic reforms in 1979 and were between ages 25 and 30 when they were interviewed in 2011–14. We compared how they said they had been raised by their parents with how they hope to raise their own children. We found that, while their parents raised them with the disciplined study habits and high expectations children needed to become successful in the newly competitive education system of the 1990s, our interviewees had developed a new understanding of what it would take for children to become successful, upwardly mobile Chinese citizens in the 2010s, and emphasized freedom and the development and pursuit of individual interests, pointing towards a hybrid form of “soft” and “hard” individualism.

This article examines why most of a cohort that attended eighth or ninth grade in 1999 at a middle school in Dalian City, Liaoning Province, China believed by 2012–2013 that children of poorer parents did better academically than children of wealthier parents. Based on survey data collected from 503 members of this cohort in 1999 and 2012–13, we found that business owners were the wealthiest among respondents’ parents, that children of business owner mothers were less likely to get into a prestigious college prep high school and attain a bachelor’s degree than children of white-collar mothers, and that children of blue-collar fathers were more likely than children of white-collar fathers to get into a prestigious high school and obtain a bachelor’s degree. Based on follow-up interviews with 48 of these respondents, we found that business owning parents had less time than other parents to tutor their children, and that children of “poorer” parents were more motivated than children of “wealthier” parents (most of whom were business owners) to gain upward mobility through academic achievement.

This study explored the lived experiences of immediate family members who were left behind and their intra- and interpersonal struggles with other family members and their coping efforts to overcome these struggles. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis for data collection and analysis and conducted in-depth interviews with 11 participants in Korea. Two superordinate themes, with two ordinate themes in each, were identified: (a) family conflict after a family member’s suicide (“discordant grieving” and “suicide loss as a catalyst for family conflict”) and (b) forgiveness (“struggling to forgive other family members, the deceased, and themselves” and “the process and importance of forgiveness”). The implications of these findings are discussed.

This study explored the lived experiences of immediate family members who were left behind and their intra- and interpersonal struggles with other family members and their coping efforts to overcome these struggles. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis for data collection and analysis and conducted in-depth interviews with 11 participants in Korea. Two superordinate themes, with two ordinate themes in each, were identified: (a) family conflict after a family member’s suicide (“discordant grieving” and “suicide loss as a catalyst for family conflict”) and (b) forgiveness (“struggling to forgive other family members, the deceased, and themselves” and “the process and importance of forgiveness”). The implications of these findings are discussed.

This article explores how graduates of a junior high school in Dalian City, Liaoning Province, China, chose their high school and college major subject of study and the extent to which their majors fit with their work trajectories. We found that most interviewees considered the likelihood of a major and degree leading to better job opportunities more important than how the major fit with their personal interests. However, the unpredictability of the market economy in China made it difficult to anticipate which majors would lead to more lucrative jobs, and many eventually found work that did not match their majors.

Extant research on parental involvement in education has been conducted largely without respect to which parent is involved. The implicit assumption is that family–school relationship frameworks function similarly for fathers and mothers. Although there is a growing body of research examining fathers’ involvement in education, this assumption has not been tested. In this meta-analysis, we examined the relative strength of the association between educational involvement of fathers versus mothers and achievement of school-age children (kindergarten to 12th grade). The association of involvement with achievement over time (i.e., longitudinal studies) was stronger than for cross-sectional studies. Parental involvement in education was positively associated with student achievement and the relation between involvement and achievement was equally strong for fathers and mothers, although mothers’ mean levels of involvement were higher than fathers’. Moderator analyses across the different types of involvement suggested that school-based involvement and intellectual enrichment at home was more strongly related to achievement for mothers than for fathers, although there were no differences in mean levels of involvement.

Background: South Korea is characterized by a high percentage of parent–child collective suicide. Aims: This case study explores one individual’s personal experience as an adult survivor of suicide who lost his wife and his only son through parent–child collective suicide in South Korea. Method: The study reports data from a semistructured interview, which were analyzed using interpretive phenomenological anal­ysis (IPA). Results: Two themes were identified through the analysis of the narratives of the survivor. The first theme provides a detailed picture of the survivor’s explanation of why the parent–child collective suicide occurred. The second theme examines how the participant experienced complicated bereavement after his heart-breaking loss of both wife and son. Conclusion: We discuss the importance of support from other people or grief experts for the survivors of suicide who lose family to collective suicide.

Based on interviews and surveys conducted between 1999 and 2013 as part of a mixed-method longitudinal study, this article examines relationships between how fathers and mothers provided homework help for 738 eighth and ninth graders in Dalian City, Liaoning Province, China, and these students’ likelihood of getting high test scores in middle school and eventually completing regular bachelor’s degrees. We found that the relationship between fathers’ homework help and their children’s test scores in middle school was positive, while the relationship between fathers’ homework help and their children’s college attainment was negative. On the other hand, mothers’ homework help was negatively associated with their children’s middle school test scores and positively associated with their children’s college attainment. These results suggest that fathers and mothers are involved in different ways at home. Follow-up interviews with twenty-eight of the survey respondents revealed that their mothers tended to be more supportive and more frequently and regularly involved with their education, while their fathers’ involvement tended to be more sporadic and harsher.

In this mixed-method longitudinal study, we examined the continuity of son preference and daughter preference from adolescence to adulthood, and investigated how perceptions of gender equity shape these preferences among 2,273 youth born in Dalian between 1979 and 1986 under the one-child policy. The majority expressed no preference in adolescence or adulthood. Results from multivariate analysis and the narratives of 23 participants revealed that child gender preferences in adolescence were predictive of later preferences in adulthood. Furthermore, in adolescence, child gender preferences were associated with individuals’ beliefs about gender as manifested in their attitudes towards women and employment, as well as their perceptions of parental and social gender biases against women. Our findings suggest that increasingly gender-egalitarian attitudes in urban China shape the child gender preferences of singleton youth in adolescence, and are likely to contribute to their later childbearing decisions, with important social and demographic implications.

This study examines how ten young adults in Dalian City, Liaoning Province, China, perceived how their parents helped them with homework during their childhood and adolescence. Between 2011 and 2012, we interviewed five men and five women from Dalian who had first been recruited in 1999 from a college prep high school, a vocational high school, and a junior high school as part of a longitudinal study of Chinese singleton children. In this sample, most parents had not finished high school but expected their children to finish college. Parents’ lack of ability to directly assist their children in their schoolwork at home (and thus promote their children’s skills) was compensated for by involvement strategies that often tapped into their children’s motivation. Our study illustrated how several strategies that have not been reported in the Western scholarship on parental involvement (i.e., reasoning about the importance of education, watching children study, and offering food, criticizing, and blaming) can map onto the skill and motivation development model Western researchers have developed, while highlighting the previously

understudied salience of these particular strategies, especially for parents who do not have enough education to teach the skills their children need for upward mobility.

This article explores the relationship between gender and income inequality within and across households in an urban Chinese sample by looking at survey data from 381 married couples with infants born in a Nanjing hospital between 2006 and 2007 and in-depth interviews with a subsample of 80 of these couples. We explore the relationship between family income and differences between husbands’ and wives’ work preferences. A couple-level quantitative analysis shows that in lower-income families, husbands were more likely than their wives to prefer career advancement and low stress at work, and wives were more likely than their husbands to prefer state jobs. Our analyses of the qualitative subsample show that, even though high-income husbands and wives are more likely to share similar work preferences, the household division of roles within their marriages is still gendered along traditional lines, as it is in the marriages of low-income couples.