한국인의 문제해결과정 : 문화적 요소의 영향

The Coping Process of Koreans as Compared to White Americans:The Influence of Culture

The purpose of this study is to explore whether culture is a significant factor affecting the use of coping behaviors in stressful situations. The major question to be addressed is whether culture has a significant independent effect on an individual's coping behaviors over and above the other factors which research has already found to affect coping behaviors - stressors, individual differences, and social support. Coping is defined as ""the cognitive and behavioral efforts to master, reduce, or tolerate the internal and/or external demands that are created by the stressful transaction"" (Folkman, 1984). Research on the stress and coping process has demonstrated the importance of discriminating between the factors affecting the use of different coping strategies because this information is prerequisite for understanding variations in coping processes and the mechanisms through which coping processes affect long - term outcomes. Researchers have identified three factors affecting the use of different coping strategies: (1) stressor factor; (2) person factor; (3) social support factor. Although these factors have been shown to be critical to understanding the coping process, some researchers have suggested that an important factor is left out of the theoretical framework for the coping process. They have suggested that culture factor also play an important role in determining an individual's coping strategy (Aldwin, 1985; Strong, 1984; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Moos, 1986). Recently, Slavin, Rainer, McCreary, and Gowda (1991) proposed a theoretical model that includes culture as a factor in the existing model that includes culture as a factor in the existing stress and coping process model - - stating that an individual's coping behavior varies from culture to culture because the strategies concerning how one handles threatening or challenging events also vary from culture to culture. While this model implies that culture is an influential factor on the use of cop- ing behaviors, the influence of culture on coping has yet to be studied empirically. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the theoretical framework proposing that culture IS a significant predictor of coping behaviors over and above the three factors usually considered as the antecedents of coping. The hypotheses of this study are: (1) The culture factor as a whole (i.e., ethnic background, concern about loss of face, and collectivism) contributes incrementally to the prediction of the usage of coping strategies over and above control variables, such as; stressor factor, person factor, and social support factor, (2) Cultural values contribute incrementally to the prediction of the usage of coping strategies over and above ethnic background as well as control variables, such as; stressor factor, person factor, and social support factor, (3) For the Korean group, cultural values (i.e., concern about loss of face, and collectivism) contribute incrementally to the prediction of the use of coping strategies over and above control variables. The subjects consisted of 214 White American (98 male, 116 female) and 232 Koreans (106 male, 126 female) undergraduate and graduate students who were born in and are currently residing in each respective country. The package of scales consisted of four parts; (l) demographic data, (2) scales related to a specific stressful event during last six months ('level of stress involved m the event', and 'stakes involved in a stressful event'), (3) personality ('locus of control', and 'trait anxiety'), social support ('quantitative aspect of support', and ,qualitative aspect of support'), and cultural values ('collectivism', and 'loss of face'), and (4) use of coping behaviors as a dependent variable. The result of this study show that the hypotheses were confirmed in general. Culture was found out to be a significant predictor of the usage of coping behavior in eight of the ten coping scales. It also showed that, for the w