Traditionally, the aged people in Korea lived with their son's family in a family system. However, such a living pattern has changed rapidly in accordance with industrialization and urbanization of a society. This study has investigated the living pat...
Traditionally, the aged people in Korea lived with their son's family in a family system. However, such a living pattern has changed rapidly in accordance with industrialization and urbanization of a society. This study has investigated the living patterns of the aged in rural areas in the processes of urbanization.
Two villages are chosen for the study: one is a suburban village(Kachang-Myun) which is located in the vicinity of Daegu, and the other is a remote village (Hwabug-Myun) which is in a distant place from the urban center.
The major findings are:
(1) The suburban village (Kachang-Myun) shows almost the same rate in number between extended families and nuclear families, but the rate in the remote village inclines to the extended families. It implies that the people in remote villages keep the traditional family system.
(2) Of the actual living patterns, the percentage of the aged (live together) with son's family in Kachang-Myun is considerably higher than that (27.9%) of the aged who live separately, but we can not overlook the latter rate with is pretty high, while in Hwabug-Myun the former rate (81%) over-whelms the latter.
(3) The statistics on the aged people's way of thinking about the living patterns indicates that 61 percent of the total aged people in Kachang-Myun want to live together, while in Hwabug-Myun still 79.3 percent aged people want to live with their son's family.
(4) The fact that regional differences in the living patterns are remarkable seems to reveal that the degree to preserve the traditional culture in an area depends upon how ling the area is away form urban center So, whether an area is far or near from urban center may be a vital effect on the living patterns.