Cultural Meanings of Helping Others: Adolescent Prosocial Development in the United States and South Korea

• In Event: International Perspectives on Moral Development and Education

Abstract

Who becomes prosocial is an important question of contemporary society. This study highlights cultural and social-structural perspectives to prosociality. Though scholars from various disciplines have paid attention to prosociality, we have a limited knowledge of how prosociality is conceptualized and how prosocial values are affected by social structures during adolescence from a cross-cultural perspective. This study highlights the similarities and differences in prosocial values of adolescents by analyzing Education Longitudinal Studies from the U.S. and Korea on the individualism-collectivism spectrum. The patterns of associations between conventional social structural predictors and prosocial values would be generally similar in the two societies, with small variations, even as the definition of prosociality will have different emphases.

Author

• Ji Hye Kim, The University of Iowa