The Relationship of Multicultural Acceptance, Community Closeness, Self-Awareness, and Interpersonal Relationship: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach
Jung-Hyun Choi
Jung-Hyun Choi, Department of Environmental Science & Engineering, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea, East Asian.
Manuscript received on 08 June 2019 | Revised Manuscript received on 14 June 2019 | Manuscript Published on 22 June 2019 | PP: 5-11 | Volume-8 Issue-8S2 June 2019 | Retrieval Number: H10020688S219/19©BEIESP
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© The Authors. Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open-access article under the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesized model connecting self-awareness, interpersonal relationship, community closeness, with adolescent’s multicultural acceptance. Data were collected from the seventh KCYSPS (Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey) of 2016. The participants were college 1st year students. The number of participants was 927 male students. The 927 participants were all male students. The subjects with sibling were 793 persons (89.5%). The participants who had experience of visiting a foreign country was 147 students (15.9%). Multicultural acceptance was significantly positively related with community sense (r = .33, p<.001), community awareness (r = .10, p=.002), self-esteem (r = .25, p<.001), self-resilience (r = .29, p<.001), communication (r = .23, p<.001), and Peer trust (r = .22, p<.001). To improve the model fit, the final model resulted in a substantially better fit to the data (χ2 =44.99, df = 10, p < .001, TLI = 0.96, CFI = 0.98, RMSEA =0.06). Sobel’s test suggested that community closeness partially mediates the relation between self-awareness and multicultural acceptance (Z=3.41, p<.001), and community closeness fully mediates the relation between interpersonal relationship and multicultural acceptance (Z=2.94, p =.003). In the era of internationalization and multiculturalism, there should be efforts to develop multicultural acceptance of male college students as well as education to raise community closeness.
Keywords: Multicultural Acceptance, Community Sense, Community Awareness, Communication, College Students, Korea.
Scope of the Article: Structural Engineering