A Qualitative Study on the Cultural Adaptation Patterns of Married Immigrant Women in Korea- Based on Grounded Theory

Background and Purpose: The purpose of this study was to focus on married immigrate women who immigrated for the purpose of marriage with Korean men. Korea has a different type of immigrate population than other countries. Currently, there are 1,956,781 foreigners living in Korea as of the end of December 2021. The number of marriage immigrants of immigrate women who migrated for the purpose of marrying Korean men was 168,611, about 8.5% of all foreigners. Therefore, this study aims to find out how marriage migrant women have developed in their country of origin and the environmental system surrounding them adapt to the process of moving to Korea.

Methods: A total of 9 marriage migrant women participated in the in-depth interview, from 5 countries. The number of marriage migrant women who participated was 5 in the Philippines, 1 each in Vietnam, China, Japan, and Tajikistan, with a total of 9 people. Participants were able to communicate in Korean. Cases where communication in Korean was not possible were excluded. Among the participants, married migrant women who lived for the shortest period of time in Korea were 3 years, and married immigrant women who lived the longest were 30 years. The interview period took about two months from March 2023 to April 2023. This study was finally approved through deliberation by the Research Ethics Review Board (IRB) of Kunsan University, and the task management number is 1040117-202207-HR-018-03. The sampling method used the intentional sampling method and the snowball sampling method.

Findings: In the data collected through qualitative surveys, 57 concepts, 30 subcategories, and 11 categories were derived.According to the classification and results of this coding, language and food were the most important things for marriage migrant women to adapt to Korean culture, but they suffered at the same time. Most of the marriage migrant women are said to have been frustrated, lonely, and conflicts due to difficulties in communicating due to difficulties in listening and speaking Korean at the beginning of their marriage. The difficulty of marriage migrant women adapting to Korean culture is food culture. Marriage migrant women showed a pattern of giving up their culture and choosing Korean culture for life in Korea when they were in conflict.Marriage migrant women had difficulty adapting to Korean in-laws' culture. Marriage migrant women called it the in-laws culture that men's status in the house is highly valued by women's status and that women have to do all the housework.

Conclusion and Implications: As a result of the qualitative survey analysis, marriage migrant women sometimes stopped Korean language education due to childbirth and economic activities after entering Korea, showing difficulties in adapting to Korea. Therefore, it is necessary to expand the Korean language visiting teacher program for marriage migrant women currently being conducted in Korea to prevent marriage migrant women from learning Korean due to childbirth and employment. For Korean language teachers visiting married migrant women's families, it is necessary to increase the level of understanding of married migrant women through multicultural understanding education.