Children's Views of Their Child Care and Kindergarten Experiences: A Cross-Cultural Exploratory Study in Korea and the United States

• In Event: 29.062 - Implementing Child Participation-Based Research in Four National Contexts

Abstract

Objectives or Purpose
Although a growing body of research seeks to understand children’s lived experiences in early childhood settings, many related publications focus on children in western societies such as northern Europe, Australia, and, to a lesser extent, North America (Einarsdottir, 2005, 2011; Moss, Clark, & Kjørholt, 2010). Similarly, information on diverse children’s perspectives from contrasting socioeconomic backgrounds is relatively rare. This study sought to better understand children’s perspectives of their everyday early care and education experiences in culturally contextualized ways.

Methods and Data Sources
A total of 91 children from four to seven years of age from the southwest United States and urban Korean cities participated in the study. We chose Korea and the U.S. in part because of the markedly different definition of social relationships and communications styles. Influenced by Confucism, adults and young children have a hierarchical relationship in Korea. Thus, it is possible that Korean children may voice their opinions differently compared to children in the U.S.

Theoretical Framework
Critiquing universal approaches to addressing child participation rights, we argue that being responsive to cultural differences in social relationship and communication styles may enable children to more freely share their perspectives with adults (Alanen, 2010; Habashi, 2008; James, 2007; Kjørholt, 2011; Ndimande & Swadener, 2012, 2013; Swadener & Polakow, 2011). We adopted Hofstede (2001)’s cultural dimensions as our framework for our cross-cultural analysis. Among his five cultural dimensions, we employed three cultural dimensions which have been widely used to compare Korean and American culture (Cho & Cheon, 2005; Hofstede, 2001; Kim & Papacharissi, 2003) and relevant to our study on children’s voices. These cultural dimensions include (1) power distance, (2) individualism-collectivism and (3) low-high context.

Results and Conclusions
The findings of the study suggest that there were subtle cultural differences in the way children in Korea and U.S. expressed their views on school, which can be understood and discussed in the light of implicit cultural practices: power distance, collectivism-individualism, and high and low context. Specifically, children in Korea were less willing to express critical views of their care and education experiences in response to direct questions by an adult researcher while children in U.S. were explicitly verbal about what they don’t like about their institutions, which can be only explained within the sociocultural context of each country.

Scientific or Scholarly Significance
The current study has potential to shed light on understanding differences in social relationship and young children’s communication that can be applied to methodological implications for cross-cultural research with children and discuss ways to improve the quality of children’s daily care and education experiences by listening to children’s challenges and desires across diverse sociocultural settings.

Authors

• Haesung Im, Arizona State University - Tempe

• Beth Blue Swadener, Arizona State University