Abstract

The first analysis examined whether the Korean adolescents' concept of family coincides with the collectivistic concept of extended family or with the individualistic concept of atomic family. A vector model which is a subclass of analyses under the common label "multidimensional unfolding" revealed that Korean adolescents collectivistically conceive "family" as an extended kinship network as having been argued by many cross-cultural investigators. An interesting result from the first analysis was that those adolescents rated "Nation" as more important than "Neighbor" to themselves, which was interpreted to be resulted from the long period of centralized political control in the history of Korean peninsular. The second analysis indicated that collectivistic ideology among Korean adolescents was largely unrelated with other values such as son preference, female virginity, personal dignity, and social power. The positive and negative sides of these findings were discussed in terms of cultural integrity of Korean society and social adaptation of Korean adolescents.