한국 청소년의 소수집단에 대한 사회적 거리감 분석 연구

Abstract

This study investigated the level of adolescents’ social distance to minority groups(the children of multicultural families, North Korean refugees and Chinese Koreans in Korea) and explored factors influencing their social distance. For this, 1095 Korean high school students in Seoul completed a questionnaire including measures such as Korean identity, perception of threat, directivity of homogeneous nation and social distance to four groups(three minority groups and a comparative group). The results are as follows. First, they showed far feeling of social distance to three minority groups in comparison with comparative-group, American group which was found as the favorable group by previous studies. They expressed most intimate feeling to the children of multicultural families, and next North Korean refugees, and Chinese Koreans in Korea in order. Second, by regression analysis of influencing factors to the social distance, adolescents’ perception of threat from minority group was found as the most effective factor to explain early adolescents’ social distance. Their ethnic identity, civic identity and the directivity of homogeneous nation play significant role in the adolescents’ social distance. Korean adolescents tend to accept other groups as same nation people very exclusively with difficulty even though same ethnic people such as North Korean refugees and Chinese Koreans in Korea. This is on the reason that Korean youngsters have feeling the threat toward them.