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Parental and Peer Influences on Adolescent Drug Use in Korea

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Abstract

The analysis and findings reported here are from a self-report questionnaire survey of a sample of 1,035 high school students in Pusan, a metropolitan area of South Korea. Multiple regression and path analyses reveal that, for all types of drug behavior among these adolescents, the influence of parental variables was generally less than the influence of the peer variables. Even in South Korean society, where the stability and authority of the family is greater than in American society, peers have a greater influence than do parents on adolescents’ engaging in or refraining from deviant behavior. The findings conform more to the expectations of social learning theory than to those of social bonding theory, and generally replicate findings from research on adolescent drug use in the United States. Further research is clearly needed, but the findings here suggest that the social processes of substance use among adolescents and the theoretical explanations focusing on those processes are not confined to western societies.

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Notes

  1. In Korea, mandatory education is six years in elementary school and three years in middle school. Upon graduation from middle school, students have to take a national test. Those who score well on the test can enter into a “liberal” high school that is preparatory to university enrollment. Those who do not do well on these standardized tests will normally select one of the “industrial” high schools, variously referred to as “technical”, “commercial”, and “informational” high schools, to attend. Most high school seniors in the liberal school are able to be admitted into a university after taking another national test, similar to the SAT in America. On the other hand, industrial high school students are largely limited to a trade, factory job, or other manual (or what would be referred to in America as a blue collar) job after high school. They have essentially no opportunity for a college or university education. Whether liberal or industrial, the high schools are not co-educational; there are separate schools for boys and girls (see the Appendix).

  2. There was some small but unknown number of students who had been kicked out of school or moved to a different school district by the time of the study and therefore did not participate.

  3. Number of cases for the equations in Tables 1 and 2 range between 884 and 910, reflecting listwise deletion cases without missing values.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Public Administration, 1-21 Gye-Dong, Jongno-Gu, Seoul, 110-800, South Korea

    Sunghyun Hwang

  2. Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA

    Ronald L. Akers

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  1. Sunghyun Hwang
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  2. Ronald L. Akers
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Correspondence to Ronald L. Akers.

Appendix: Additional Notes on Research Procedure and Protocols

Appendix: Additional Notes on Research Procedure and Protocols

Sampling and Procedures

The sample design was two-staged. In the first stage of the research schools were stratified on the basis of (1) geographical location (district), (2) type of school (industrial or liberal), and (3) gender of school population (boys or girls). In Pusan, different districts exhibit different social characteristics, and thus geographical dispersion is important for maximizing representativeness. In addition, as noted in the footnote to Sample and Procedures, schools in Korea are commonly differentiated into two general quality levels: liberal (high or middle quality) and industrial (middle or low quality). At the time of the study, the schools in Pusan were sex segregated (although this has changed). This produced four mutually exclusive strata from which the schools were sampled—boys’ liberal high school, boys’ industrial high school, girls’ liberal high school, and girls’ industrial high school—from the 16 school districts in Pusan.

To provide representation from the different districts and types of school, 26 schools were selected from 136 high schools of Pusan—10 boys’ liberal high schools (38.5%), 6 boys’ industrial high schools (23.1%), 5 girls’ liberal high schools (19.2%), and 5 girls’ industrial high schools (19.2%)—from the 16 districts in Pusan. Two of the high schools are in a small town outside the metropolitan Pusan area, while the other twenty-four are within the metropolitan area.

In the second stage, for each high school in the sample, classes were randomly sampled from the required or general enrollment classes, and all students in that class were included in the sample. While this sampling procedure does not yield a true random sample of students, it does approximate to allowing each student in the school district to have an equal chance of being sampled for the study, and provided the best means available to us to avoid systematic selection bias.

Data Collection: Administration of the Questionnaire

The data collection instrument was a questionnaire constructed originally and specifically for this research project. It was modeled closely on the items and format of the questionnaires developed by Ronald L. Akers and his associates for the Boys Town study of adolescent substance use and the Iowa study of teenage smoking (see Akers, 1998). A key feature of this instrument is the careful construction of items designed to measure theoretical concepts from social learning, social control, and strain theories with items having strong face validity and subsequently shown to have some predictive validity. For the complete instrument, see Hwang (2000).

The questionnaire was administered to all students in attendance in the randomly sampled classes who had obtained written permission from the school principal prior to the day of the survey. Respondents were informed, carefully and clearly, of the nature and purpose of the study and the questionnaire, were assured of the complete anonymity of their responses, and that no one would see the responses except the researchers. They were informed that they had no obligation to participate, that there were no risks or consequences to participating or not participating, that they could omit any question or section of questions they did not want to answer, and that if they did not wish to participate they could leave the entire instrument blank.

The items on substance use included alcohol, tobacco, depressants (with Geborin, Saridon, Penjal, Sedaphin, and Nubain given as examples), stimulants ( with Timing, Night, Esnanine, Reglin given as examples), inhalants (with bond, sinna, and butane-gas given as examples), marijuana, and other drugs (with LSD, philophone, concaine, narcotics given as examples). The analysis here does not include findings on inhalants or other drugs. Most of the examples given of stimulants and depressants are brand names of drugs produced by Korean pharmaceutical companies for legitimate distribution but which have been diverted to recreational use. The high school students responding to the questionnaire who have used these substances are familiar with the names.

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Hwang, S., Akers, R.L. Parental and Peer Influences on Adolescent Drug Use in Korea. Asian Criminology 1, 51–69 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-006-9009-5

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