Abstract

South Korea has experienced enormous changes through colonization, the Korean War, the division of Korea, industrialization, democratization and so on over the past 80 years. The present study aimed to track how individualism in South Korea has changed. To this end, I used demographic characteristics (divorce rate, average household size, percentage of people living alone, percentage of elderly people living alone, ratio of single-generation to multi-generation households) and cultural products (the usage of first-person pronouns in popular song lyrics, the uniqueness of baby names) that have been widely used as indices of individualism. The results showed that over time the divorce rate, the percentage of living alone, the percentage of elderly people living alone, and the ratio of single-generation to multi-generation households, and the usage of first-person singular pronoun in popular song lyrics have increased, whereas average household size has decreased. However, the uniqueness in baby names has rather decreased and the usage of first-person plural pronouns has remained stable, suggesting that the temporal changes in individualism in Korea are complex. The present study has implications for tracking long-term shifts in individualism in Korea using non-self-report measures.