This study sought to analyze the characteristics of low-income families in terms of marital relationship, as well as the intergenerational transfers of familial and cultural capital during the second economic crisis in South Korea.
To verify the relationship between marital relationship and socio-environmental factors such as age, education, income-class, employment status of husbands and wives, housework sharing satisfaction, outdoor recreation activities, and domestic violence experiences, this research performed hierarchical regression analysis using the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Family data. Also, this study scrutinized adolescents' familial environment and their career preparation behaviors by regression analysis using the Korea Youth Panel Survey data. The adolescents' career preparation behavior variable was selected as the representative variable to show the capacity to escape from hereditary poverty.
The results indicated that younger married-women and ones' husbands with lower education backgrounds tend to have negative marital relationship. In terms of income-class, the married women of low-income class have relatively negative marital relationship compared to the ones' of high-income class. Additionally, women-householders have negative marital relationship compared to husband-householders or dual-earner couples. This outcome elucidates negative effects of the women's double-burdens to marital relationship, housework burden and economical burden. Moreover, domestic violence experiences have fatal influences on the marital relationship. Besides the negative factors that contribute to worsening marital relationship, this research also presents findings that housework sharing and outdoor recreation activities with husbands play a significant role in positive marital relationship.
Also, from the test for the adolescents' career preparation behaviors, we found that youths from low-income families have low level of parental attachment, have lack of parental monitoring, and are more frequently exposed of family violence and vulnerable community environment. These negative familial and communal environment have significantly negative effects on adolescents' career preparation behaviors. It means that both positive parent-child relationship and marital relationship are essential to enhance adolescents' career preparation which in turn can be a protective factor to cut off hereditary poverty.
From this quantitative research, we subsequently propose several policy suggestions to reinforce positive marital and parental relationship to effectively prevent or mitigate the hereditary poverty. In macro-perspectives, the social safety net should be provided to stablize life-environment for vulnerable low-income women and families. The current social welfare mechanism needs to be changed from the ex-post intervention to the preventative intervention. In addition, the benefit of social welfare services needs to be provided for more universal subjects. On top of that, the related community institutes need to have closer cooperation line and a networking system to provide comprehensive social welfare services for adolescents from vulnerable low-income families.
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