ORCID

https://orcid.org/0009-0005-8477-2060

Date of Award

Summer 2026

Language

English

Embargo Period

8-6-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Sociology

Program

Sociology

First Advisor

Zoya Gubernskaya

Committee Members

Kate Strully, Katherine Trent

Keywords

Multicultural adolescents, intergroup friendship, intergroup dating, intergroup marriage, attitude trajectories, South Korea

Subject Categories

Family, Life Course, and Society | Migration Studies | Race and Ethnicity | Social Psychology and Interaction

Abstract

This dissertation asks how multicultural adolescents in South Korea develop their attitudes toward crossing group boundaries in social and intimate life—whom they would accept as a close friend, a romantic partner, and a spouse—and what factors shape these attitudes. Korea’s immigrant population has grown more than seventyfold since 1990, largely through marriage migration, and the children of those unions are now reaching adulthood. Research on these adolescents has focused on how well they adjust, leaving open how they themselves come to view relationships across group lines.

Using eight annual waves of the Multicultural Adolescent Panel Study (N = 1,112), which follows adolescents from age 11 to 18, the analysis proceeds in three stages: cross-sectional regression establishing where attitudes stand at age 18, group-based trajectory modeling identifying developmental pathways in each domain, and multinomial logistic regression predicting membership in those pathways. All analyses are conducted separately by gender.

The results point to four conclusions. First, attitudes follow the social-distance gradient, with openness highest toward friendship, lowest toward marriage, and dating falling somewhere in between. Second, female adolescents report greater openness than male adolescents in every domain. Third, adolescents’ attitudes do not follow a single developmental path: each domain contains three to five distinct trajectories, ranging from sustained rejection to steep reversals into acceptance, with rejecting trajectories appearing only in the more institutionally weighted domains of dating and marriage. Fourth, and most consequentially, what predicts these pathways is not adolescents’ ascribed background but their own self-definition. Maternal origin shows no consistent association with attitudes across models; the rare exceptions that do emerge are estimated from very small subgroups and do not survive alternative specifications. National identification and Korean national attachment, by contrast, are consistently associated with openness toward intergroup relationships, and in opposite directions: adolescents who identify exclusively as Korean are less open, while those with greater attachment to Korea are more open. These results suggest that in a society defining membership through common descent, the identity position that most resembles assimilation is the one accompanied by the greatest closure toward others.

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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