Sung won Kim

Bio: Sung won Kim is an academic researcher from Yonsei University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Academic achievement & Socioeconomic status. The author has an hindex of 12, co-authored 28 publications receiving 419 citations. Previous affiliations of Sung won Kim include Harvard University & University of Oxford.

Case study of a survivor of suicide who lost all family members through parent-child collective suicide

Abstract: Background: South Korea is characterized by a high percentage of parent–child collective suicide. Aims: This case study explores one individual’s personal experience as an adult survivor of suicide who lost his wife and his only son through parent–child collective suicide in South Korea. Method: The study reports data from a semistructured interview, which were analyzed using interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). Results: Two themes were identified through the analysis of the narratives of the survivor. The first theme provides a detailed picture of the survivor’s explanation of why the parent–child collective suicide occurred. The second theme examines how the participant experienced complicated bereavement after his heart-breaking loss of both wife and son. Conclusion: We discuss the importance of support from other people or grief experts for the survivors of suicide who lose family to collective suicide.

Differences Between Chinese Mothers' and Fathers' Roles in their Children's Education *

Abstract: As researchers, we attempt to better understand the mechanisms and processes of parental involvement in children’s education since it is often negatively associated with child academic outcomes. China provides an interesting context in which to investigate this issue knowing that Chinese parents are extremely invested in their children’s education and are heavily involved at home. This study examines how young adults in Dalian City, China, perceive and evaluate their parents’ involvement in their education during their childhood and adolescence, and how they make meaning of their experiences. In 2011, ten participants from Dalian provided retrospective narratives about how their parents tutored them during their childhood and adolescence. These students had been recruited in 1999 from a college prep high school, a vocational high school, and a junior high school as part of a longitudinal study of Chinese singleton children. We focus especially on their fathers’ home-based involvement, as literature on fathers’ educational involvement is almost non-existent in China in spite of its potential importance. Our participants’ parents were found to engage in several strategies absent from previous research, such as jiang daoli (reasoning about the importance of education), watching children study, or offering food. Our findings suggest that motivational factors and parental beliefs about children’s potential were especially critical mechanisms of influence. Fathers were less involved in their children’s education than mothers but, when involved, were often engaged in disciplinary action in response to poor performance. Learning In and Out of School Kim and Fong 1 Differences Between Chinese Mothers’ and Fathers’ Roles in their Children’s Education Many studies conducted in the United States and worldwide have shown that parental involvement in children’s education is beneficial for children’s school success (Epstein, 2001; Hill & Chao, 2009; Hoover-Dempsy & Sandler, 1995, 1997). But most scholarship on parental involvement in children’s education in the United States and worldwide has focused mostly on mothers, leaving fathers out of the picture, and ignoring the voices of the children themselves (Barnard, 2004; Greif & Greif, 2004). Few studies have looked at children’s retrospective understandings of differences between mothers’ and fathers’ involvement in children’s education anywhere in the world, and none have looked at them in China. Our study investigates the salient mechanisms and processes of mothers’ and fathers’ home-based involvement as experienced by young Chinese adults through their retrospective narratives. In this study, we specifically examine the processes and mechanisms of the fathers’ home-based involvement, and how they differ from those of the mothers’. Theoretical Framework In China, parents are often involved only in home settings (Gu, 2008). Kong (2008) refers to this type of involvement as invisible forms of parental involvement in their children’s schooling. Previous studies have attempted to explain why Chinese parents tend to be more involved in home settings instead of participating in school settings like European American parents (Chao, Kanatsu, Stanoff, Padmawidjaja, & Aque, 2009; Stevenson & Stigler, 1992). In a study conducted in Beijing, parents and teachers were found to work together in non-overlapping spheres, and parents did not understand the importance of school involvement as they believed that teachers, not parents, should be responsible for children’s education at school (Stevenson & Stigler, 1992). Another study conducted in rural China supported the idea that the lack of parents’ active school-based involvement in China stemmed from the traditional view that teachers are responsible for children’s education and have authority at school while parents’ authority lies at home, and parents’ roles are separate from that of the school (Chi & Rao, 2003). Pomerantz, Moorman, and Litwack (2007) distinguished between two broad categories of home-based involvement identified in US literature: intellectual enrichment refers to home activities that are not directly related to school but can help develop children’s cognitive and Learning In and Out of School Kim and Fong 2 metacognitive processes (e.g., taking children to the museum) while the second type of involvement refers to home-based activities that are more directly related to school (e.g., homework help or responding to school performance). In this study, we focused on the second type of home-based involvement, which is more controversial because research has shown that it is often negatively associated with school performance, and because the processes involved for this type of involvement are not yet fully understood (Cooper, 1989; Cooper, Lindsay, & Nye, 2000; Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008). One explanation for the negative relationship between homework help and children’s achievement is that those children whose parents were involved with homework tasks are already struggling at school (e.g., Pomerantz, Grolnick, & Price, 2005). Pomerantz and Eaton’s (2001) longitudinal study of middle-class European families found that parents were helping their children with homework when their children were struggling at school, but that after controlling initial achievement, the direction of influence of parental help with homework was positive. Another explanation is that parents engage with their children around homework tasks in negative ways, such as pressuring them or conveying negative messages about children’s ability to achieve (Hill & Tyson, 2009; Leung, Yeung, & Wong, 2010). In the Chinese context, although the research points to the importance of home-based involvement, very little work has been conducted on Chinese fathers’ engagement in school-related homebased involvement and their mechanisms of influence. Most worldwide parental educational involvement studies have focused on mothers while excluding fathers. This focus arises partly from widespread beliefs among both researchers and research participants that mothers are more closely involved in children’s education than fathers (e.g., Lamb, 2010; Lareau, 1989; Parke, 2002). As a consequence, because parental involvement measures are often reported by mothers only, even in two-parent families, it is difficult to say whether the current definitions of parental involvement provided in this body of research adequately capture father involvement and whether fathers also engage in the activities described in the literature (Barnard, 2004; Greif & Greif, 2004). It is important to note differences between mothers and fathers suggested by previous research in the US and some other Western countries. US studies have found that, in general, mothers are more involved than fathers (Parke, 2002). This might be because men spend more time in paid work especially following the transition to parenthood, while women spend less time in paid work and more time on household duties and child rearing (Budig & England, 2001; Learning In and Out of School Kim and Fong 3 Glauber, 2007). Furthermore, fathers perceive fathering as a voluntary activity they “do” to help their wives, with varying standards and expectations, whereas mothers generally experience mothering as something they “are” (Ehrensaft, 1987). In US and Finnish studies of children in elementary school, fathers were also found to use complex language with their children and use teaching strategies that place higher cognitive demands on children than the strategies used by mothers, whereas mothers were engaged more in caretaking and nurturing activities on a daily basis, and were found to be more involved in indoor, cognitively oriented activities with their children (Biller & Kimpton, 1997; Laakso, 1995; Paquette, 2004; Parke, 2000, 2002). This suggests that mothers might be more involved with their children’s education at home regularly on a daily basis than fathers. However, in Chinese societies, fathers are no less involved than mothers in their children’s education, as both parents are considered responsible for child training and the academic success of their children (Abbott, 1992; Chen, Dong, & Zhou, 1997; Ho, 1987). Especially after the one-child policy, mainland Chinese parents have become increasingly childcentered, and fathers are increasingly active in childrearing and are heavily involved in their children’s education especially after middle school (Jankowiak, 1992, 2002). Chinese fathers were found to have more influence on children’s learning tactics than mothers (Feng, 2007), and helped with homework more than mothers (Abbott, 1992). Although our interviews, participant observations, and survey findings suggest that fathers in our Chinese sample play an important role in children’s education, we still hypothesize that important differences exist between mothers’ and fathers’ roles in children’s education. A study of the work preferences of mothers and fathers in Nanjing illustrates how Chinese fathers perceived their roles as distinct from those of mothers in the household (Kim et al., 2010). In China, the popular catchphrase “strict father, kind mother” (yanfucimu) further highlights some gendered mother-father differences. This adage describes fathers as the strict disciplinarians and mothers as the nurturing caregivers in the household (Chao & Tseng 2002; Shwalb, Nakazazva, Yamamoto, & Hyun, 2010). The literature on Chinese parenting supports this portrayal, and Chinese mothers were found to be warmer and less restrictive than fathers but also more demanding in mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong samples (Berndt, Cheung, Lau, Hau, & Lew, 1993). Adolescents communicated less frequently with their fathers than with their mothers and reported more negative communication with their fathers (Shek, 2000). Fathers in Learning In and Out of School Kim and Fong 4 mainland China were also found more likely to

In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press) 1982.

Abstract: Introduction 1. Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle 2. Images of Relationship 3. Concepts of Self and Morality 4. Crisis and Transition 5. Women's Rights and Women's Judgment 6. Visions of Maturity References Index of Study Participants General Index

Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood

Abstract: MacLeod, Jay. 2009 (3rd ed). Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood. Boulder. CO: Westview Press In Ain't No Making' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood (1987) Jay MacLeod expertly shows education's role in the process of social reproduction, or how class inequality passes from one generation to the next. On the jacket cover of the third edition, preeminent sociologists-like William J. Wilson-comment enthusiastically about the updates on subjects' socio-economic status 20+ years after the initial study. They underscore the "classic" status of ANMI in scholarship on structural inequality and social reproduction. For readers unfamiliar with the book, I briefly describe the author's initial study and the contributions from data collected for the second edition. Following this, I discuss the added longitudinal data obtained for the third edition, its important new insights, and the usefulness of this book for courses in several core areas of sociology. In 1982 Jay MacLeod conducted participant observation of two groups of male youth, the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers. Both lived in a housing project called Clarendon Heights, but the two groups differed in important respects. The Hallways Hangers are predominantly white youth who, at that point in their young lives, openly resisted the American achievement ideology advanced by schools. They were dropouts and underachievers, saw few opportunities for themselves in the economy and other structures of society, and subsequently had no aspirations for a better life. In contrast the Brothers, predominantly black youth, demonstrated their belief in America as a land of opportunity by adopting its cultural norms, institutional rules, and by applying themselves in school (albeit with mixed results). They had strong faith that education would give them the needed human capital to succeed in middle-class jobs. When asked about racism, most believed that collective discrimination was a thing of the past. Any future challenges they faced from prejudicial people could be overcome with focus, hard work, and commitment. By dismissing racism and classism, both groups failed to recognize any structural basis for inequality. MacLeod also shows how the process of social reproduction works in practice. Social structure, he explains, becomes embedded in the "habitus" (Bourdieu) of the lower classes and shapes the aspirations of the Hallway Hangers and Brothers. Habitus refers to "subjects' dispositions, which reflect a class-based experience and a corresponding social grammar of taste, knowledge, and behavior." Using habitus as a theoretical framework, MacLeod stresses, helps to transcend the dualism that characterizes scholarship on social reproduction. It is not solely one-structure-or the other-agency. Both are responsible for class inequality and its reproduction. (Although MacLeod does concede that structure is primary.) The second edition is based on data collected on the men's lives nine years later, and the comparative racial dimension of this study yields another important insight into the process of social reproduction. The majority of Hallway Hangers and Brothers have jobs in the secondary labor market, with low wages, skill requirements, and irregular work. …

Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism

Abstract: Other Modernities: tendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. LISA ROFEL. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; 330 pp. Lisa Rofel's Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism explores the processes by which three cohorts of women working in a silk factory in the city of Hangzhou have crafted memories and narratives of their lives. Drawing on factory floor discussions, interviews, and personal conversations, Rofel focuses on the constitution of gendered identities as a means of probing aspects of modernity inflected with power. The result is a theoretically sophisticated yet broadly accessible account which combines an analysis of narrative based on cultural and historical specificities, and on the politics of representation, with a reflexive interrogation of western representations of Chinese women and China, beginning with views formerly held by Rofel herself. Rofel begins by problematizing modernity as something imagined, a discourse that the west subscribes to as opposed to an essence or a state of being. She challenges western assumptions of modernity as a monolithic category-sort of an endpoint in a teleological tale in which the United States and Europe are exemplary models. Non-western constructions of modernity are neither simply part of a universal phenomenon (that is, essentially the same beast as western modernity), nor can they be explained as an entirely different animal, a phenomenon unique to its cultural or local context. Rofel criticizes the former view as omitting culture and the latter as omitting power. Her alternative framing pluralizes modernity and then anchors "modernities" in particular historical moments. For Rofel, modernity is a process that when scrutinized reveals how local and global configurations of power have been "knit together." Divergent constructions of modernity shape the gendered identities of the three cohorts who are the subjects of this book. These cohorts are comprised of women who came of age roughly during the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution, and the postMao era. The women in the oldest cohort construct identity in terms of their work performance and portray themselves as having been liberated by the revolution which enabled them to work. Prior to the revolution the cultural arena was characterized by a gendered distinction between "inside" and "outside." China scholars have long identified "inside" activities with femaleness and the family, and "outside" activities with maleness and the public domain. Due to this spatial designation working class women employed as factory laborers were suspected of having questionable morality, not on account of their actions but because of the "outside" location of their labor. Rofel points out that it was largely working women, formerly tainted by the inside/outside distinction, who found the new socialist state's framings a meaningful medium for crafting new gender identities through "labor" and for representing pasts that were once culturally problematic. This form of agency was shaped by Chinese Marxist discourse, which held that "work" meant activities in the public domain outside of the home. However, she argues that this framing resulted in an erasure of other forms of agency. For urban entrepreneurial families the "inside" was actually a hetero-gendered space where women interacted with male kin and engaged in labor. Thus, after the revolution women who had worked in household silk weaving workshops during the pre-revolutionary era were denied histories as workers, while women who had labored in factories could re-cast themselves as incipient feminists and revolutionaries. Rofel argues that these erasures and forms of agency were given credence by Marxist and international feminist binaries that erroneously identified women who were confined to "inside" activities with feudalism/tradition and those engaged in "outside" activities with productive labor/liberation. She accuses such binaries of replacing history with teleology and of assuming "women workers" could constitute a homogeneous subject as opposed to several situated positionalities differentially shaped by power. …