Our society is going through drastic change. This transition has directly affected family, the basic unit of society, while causing radical changes in structure, function and role of family. In particular, when it comes to internal family life, frequency of family conflict is getting higher as the value standards, life styles, expectations for each other, and role performances as family members change. What is more, despite functional defects of family resulting from the alteration in family structure, it is a well-known fact that the lack of social infrastructure for family care and family sustenance has caused diverse family problems.
This study attempted to demonstrate the importance of prevention of family problem that has already become a serious social problem. According to the law on the basic plan for healthy family clause 2 article 15 of the Healthy Family Act, the basic plan must include the following points of subsection 6: to ease the burden of family care and support, and to reduce social cost by preventing family dissolution.
In the same context, by proving that social cost is bigger than Prevention cost, this paper presented ground data for the proposition that the direction of the family policy should focus on the precautionary, universal principles more than after-the-fact prescriptions for family problems.
Through analytical research, the sum of social cost of family problems was estimated to be 5 trillion 790 billion won. However, the actual government's budget for prevention costs of family problem was 4 billion and 100 million won. Even if calculating the entire Prevention costs that is actually needed, it barely reached 20 billion won.
This study is partly limited in analyzing the above-mentioned Social cost effectiveness. The re-analysis and re-quotation of data from the previous studies were inevitable due to scarcity of data which contains information regarding the family problem. More fundamentally, because the first basic plan for healthy family has only recently begun to take effect and so the family policy has been enforced for a relatively short period of time, the study of the policy thereby possesses various problems in its form and content strategies, and performing methodology.
Therefore, the study suggested the prioritized tasks regarding not only further development of studies on family policy but also the policy itself. First, data on family and family problems must be built in order to improve analysis method for evaluating family policy effectiveness and determining the family survey period. Second, the basic plan for family health and following execution strategy must necessarily to be concretized. Third, the promotion of the outcome of Health Families Center should be reinforced while public awareness of family policy is also carefully considered.
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