Family Formation Attitudes of South Korean Women: A Life Course Perspective

Jeong-A Lee , Sciences Po, CRIS - INED

Previous literature indicates that South Korea is experiencing a significant change in certain aspects of family preferences with a trend toward liberal views emerging in the younger generation compared to the more traditional views of older cohorts, consistent with the cohort replacement theory. However, few studies have examined cross-cohort and within-cohort changes over extended periods, with within-cohort changes in family preferences remaining inconsistent in the literature. This could be due to data limitations as studies have been limited in their ability to track long-term changes. The data used in this paper is the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families, a bi-annual panel study following around 10,000 women, excluding men, every survey year from 2007 to 2022 where attrition is compensated by recruiting new participants. This study will reconcile differing patterns of change found in the literature using latent class analysis to identify various family preferences classes using two different classification methods and extensive attitude indicators. Next, individual fixed effects regression will be utilized to capture within-individual change over time and a log-linear path model with latent variables to estimate reciprocal effects between family formation attitudes and life events. Preliminary descriptive results reveal women refusing Korean marital life has increased at the expense of traditional women for whom family is necessary across cohorts and age groups. However, family support norms have not changed, they remain high and stable throughout the whole observation period: Korean women continue to uphold a strong sense of responsibility toward childrearing despite changing views on marriage.

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 Presented in Session P1. Families, Fertility, and the Life Course 1