Multiethnic Families in Korea: Examining Family Stress, Marital Satisfaction, and Depression Experienced by Foreign Spouses

Background and Purpose: Korea, once known as an immigrant sending country, is rapidly changing into a multicultural society with a growing number of foreigners entering the country every year. Inter-racial, also known as international marriages are concurrently taking place as an approximately 14 percent of all marriages in Korea were in this nature (Ministry of Gender and Families, 2005). While research on female foreign spouses has proliferated, studies examining both male and female foreign spouses are scarce. In addition, little is known about how these foreign spouses cope with family stress and how it affects their mental health. This study aims to examine the relationship of stress and depression and attempts to examine the role of their cultural maintenance activities, perceived social support, and marital satisfaction as protective factors. Methods: This study uses the 2006 Gyeonggi Province International Marriage Data for its analysis. Collected by Gyeonggido Family and Women Development Institute, the data contains demographic, socioeconomic, health and mental health, and family-related information on multiethnic families. A total of 1,013 foreign male and female spouses were included in the study. For analysis, a recursive structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the hypothesized model and to determine pathways among the variables.

Results: The model fit of the final path model was considered satisfactory with RMSEA index of .054, IFI and CFI values of .912 and chi-square value of 1302.715 (df=331, p<.05, CMIN=3.936). The findings show that the family stress had direct effect (β=.221) and indirect (β=.133) effect on depression. The strongest predictor of depression among the foreign spouses was marital satisfaction (β=-.275) that those who were more satisfied with their marital relationship were less likely to be depressed. Among the control variables, gender (β=-.054) and the length of stay had significant effect on their depression level (β=-.081) that the male foreign spouses and those with longer years of residence in Korea were less depressed than their counterparts. Neither the cultural maintenance activities nor social support had any significant effect on depression. The mediating test also confirmed that the marital satisfaction partially mediated the effect of family stress on the depression level of foreign spouses.

Implications: The findings provide several critical implications for working with the foreign population in Korea. First, the result indicated that gender played a significant role in affecting the stress, martial satisfaction, and depression relationship. The male foreign spouses were less likely to report of being stressed with family matters, more satisfied with their marital relationships and also less depressed than the female spouses. This indicates a need to develop more gender-specific interventions in working with foreign spouses as females are at a higher risk of experiencing stress and depression. Second, as marital satisfaction was found to be a significant protective factor mediating the stress-depression relationship among the foreign spouses, it points to a need to address the importance of marital relationship in working with multi-ethnic families and to develop and implement various interventions to improve their marital relationships.