Preceded studies on relationships with spouses in Korea are generally focused on satisfaction with marriage, roles, authority structure, marriage conflicts and communication, and not many studies have considered intimacy with spouses. We also lack emp...
Preceded studies on relationships with spouses in Korea are generally focused on satisfaction with marriage, roles, authority structure, marriage conflicts and communication, and not many studies have considered intimacy with spouses. We also lack empirical resources and information to improve quality of intimacy between married couples. Family is a system in which members build very close relationships and influence one another to a great extend. Therefore, supporting old parents is expected to influence relationship of married couples. However, there are not many studies on this topic.
This study approached the topic of "correlation between intimacy with spouse and awareness and burden of supporting old parents" from a new perspective. An empirical and systematic study on this topic is very important so as to understand how intimacy of married couples influences their awareness and burden of supporting old parents and present appropriate welfare measures to enhance intimacy.
This study gathered data from 200 copies of survey on married women who live in Incheon which was implemented between May 20 and May 30. For statistical analysis, SPSS for Windows (Ver. 10.0) was used.
The following summarizes findings:
First, most responders (79.7%) responded that they are providing economic support (34.5%), emotional support (31.1%), or both (14.1%). As most of they are providing either economic or emotional support or both, it is considered that economic and emotional support take the biggest portion of different types of support.
Second, burden of supporting old parents and intimacy with spouse showed a negative correlation. In other words, the hypothesis of this study "Intimacy of married couple would be related to burden of supporting old parents" was proven correct. This implies that it is important to provide social measures to mitigate conflicts and dilemma in supporting old parents and improve quality of relationship with spouse at the same time.
Third, sexual intimacy of married couple and stresses caused by supporting old parents also hada negative correlation. In other words, strong sexual intimacy caused less stress in supporting old parents. This was a very meaningful finding.
Fourth, it was found that emotional intimacy and sexual intimacy of married couples do nothave any correlation with the three subcategories of awareness of supporting old parents. Another hypothesis of this study was that "Intimacy of married couple would be related to awareness of supporting old parents." However, the reason of such conflicting results would be because awareness of supporting old parents no longer has great impact on the views of nuclear families.