지역사회 문화 탐방 필요도와 대학생활 적응 및 중도탈락 의도 간의 구조적 관계

Abstract

Objectives The purpose of this study is to find out the structural relationship between the need to explore community culture for early childhood education department freshmen and university life adaptation and the intention to drop out intention, and to analyze it in a multi-group analysis based on the experience of exploring community culture.
 Methods The subjects of the study are 240 freshmen who entered the Department of Early Childhood Education in Gyeonggi-do, Chungcheong-do, Jeolla-do, and Gyeongsang-do. The directionality and normality of the research variables were validated using SPSS 23.0 and AMOS 25.0 programs. The structural relationship between variables was analyzed by the suitability of the structural model and path coefficient using structural equations. The differences between groups were verified by multi-group analysis after the test of homogeneity.
 Results Main findings are as follows. First, the normality of the research variables was confirmed, and the mean of the intention to drop out midway was low. However, the perceived need for exploring the local community culture and adapting to university life, as well as the sub-domains of academic adjustment, social adjustment, and personal-emotional adjustment, was generally high. Second, the intention to drop out showed statistically significant negative correlation with the need to explore community culture, university life adaptation and sub-areas, academic adaptation, social adaptation, personal-emotional adaptation. Third, it was found that the need to explore community culture directly and indirectly affects the intention to drop out, and directly affects the university life adaptation. The results of this study can be interpreted as university life adaptation partially mediates in the process of the need to explore community culture affecting the intention to drop out. Fourth, as a result of multi-group analysis, in the cases of students with experience in exploring community culture, the need to explore community culture had had a greater impact on university life adaptation than those who did not.
 Conclusions The results of this study confirm the importance of exploring community culture experience and suggest the direction for the internalization for the program. In addition, I would like to suggest a way to stably operate the extracurricular program suitable for the characteristics of each university and department.