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Part of the book series: Advances in Immigrant Family Research ((ADIMFAMRES))

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Abstract

This chapter provides a brief overview of the literature on Korean families living in the United States and Canada. According to the 2010 U.S. Census data, there was a 43% increase in the Latino and Asian populations between 2000 and 2010, leading to 14.7 million for the Asian population in 2010 (Hong et al., 2014). Korean Americans ranked as the fifth largest Asian population (Jang et al., 2015; Min, 2013). By 2018, about 1.5 million were Korean Americans (Asian alone category; U.S. Census Bureau, 2018a). There is a smaller but growing Korean population in Canada, with 190,000 residents according to the 2016 Census of Canada. About 150,000 people reported Korean language as their mother tongue and about 70 percent of them (109,000 people) indicated Korean language as language spoken most often at home (Statistics Canada, 2017). Given their substantial presence as an Asian ethnic group in both the United States and in Canada and more importantly, the increasing heterogeneity of the population, this chapter reviews and expands the existing literature on Korean families. Specifically, this chapter examines the diverse characteristics of Koreans in the United States and Canada, and how these factors can be closely linked to supporting the well-being of adults and children in Korean families.

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Acknowledgments

The first author acknowledges and expresses gratitude to the members of her Academic Breadth Comprehensive Paper committee for their support on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jessica J. Jeong .

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Jeong, J.J., Kim, A.H. (2021). Korean Families. In: Chuang, S.S., Moodley, R., Gielen, U.P., Akram-Pall, S. (eds) Asian Families in Canada and the United States. Advances in Immigrant Family Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56452-0_7

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