Abstract
The AsiaBarometer survey of 1,023 respondents shows Life in Korea is highly modernized and digitalized without being much globalized. Despite the modernization and digitalization of their lifestyles, ordinary citizens still prioritize materialistic values more than post-materialistic values, and they remain least satisfied in the material life sphere. A multivariate analysis of the Korean survey reveals that their positive assessments of their standard of living and marriage are the most powerful influences on the quality of life they experience. Remarkable improvements in the objective conditions of life for the past three decades have failed to transform Korea into a nation of well-being.
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Notes
The sample does not include those aged 70 and over, which accounted for 9% of the total population of Korea in 2005. The exclusion of this age group is likely to distort findings on value priorities, feelings of happiness, enjoyment, and achievement, and levels of satisfaction with specific life domains, especially health, income, and the social welfare system.
There is no one who has the use of two utilities or fewer.
To construct a seven-point index of overall quality of life, we first converted the five-point happiness scale into a three-point scale (very happy = 2, quite happy = 1, and neither happy nor unhappy, not too happy, and very unhappy = 0), and the four-point enjoyment and achievement scales into their respective three-point scales (often = 2, sometimes = 1, and rarely and never = 0 for the enjoyment scale; a great deal = 2, some = 1, and very little and none = 0 for the achievement scale). We then summed up the recoded scores of happiness, enjoyment, and achievement. Scores on the resulting index range from 0 to 6, which represent, respectively, the worst and best overall quality of life. However, it should be noted that because of the nature of its component scales, this index of overall life quality is biased toward the affective quality of life at the expense of its cognitive quality.
In order to perform an analysis of an entire sample, satisfaction with marriage was excluded from the first set of regression equations. In contrast, since the second set of regression equations included satisfaction with marriage and excluded marital status, it applies to married people only.
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Park, CM. The Quality of Life in South Korea. Soc Indic Res 92, 263–294 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-008-9348-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-008-9348-y