• Journal of Family Relations
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.97-127
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• 2016

Objective: This study explored benefits of a relationship-focused intervention to enhance marriage communication designed for multicultural married couples and changes that occurred in the way the program's participants communicated with one another. Method: The intervention program was implemented on six married multicultural couples (and six other couples as a control group), and their communication, conflict resolution, and adaptation before and after the intervention were examined. In addition, the researchers kept observation journals to understand the changes in the manner in which the married multicultural couples communicated with their spouse and examine their perception about participating in the program; further, we conducted post-program interviews with the participants after the completion of the program. Results: The results of this study are as follows: (1) the experiment group made more progress in improving couple communication, resolving marriage conflicts, and adapting as a married couple than the control group in a statistically significant manner in both preand post-program tests, and (2) the study confirmed through qualitative analysis that the program made positive contributions to improving the couples' abilities to have conversations and resolve conflicts, as well as their intimacy. Conclusion: Based on these results, implications for further research and practices were discussed.

• Korean Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.981-997
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• 2014

This study set out to examine the adaptation capabilities of husbands in multicultural families and further identify strengths to maintain a healthy multicultural family based on the grounded theory. For those objectives, the investigator had an ongoing interview with ten husbands that had a child in the setting of multicultural family and were judged to maintain a healthy family. Question analysis through the method of Strauss & Cobin and the abstraction and categorization process among similar concepts identified total 89 concepts, 24 subcategories, and 11 categories. In a paradigm model according to the axial coding results, the causal condition was "having an international marriage with the spouse"; the contextual conditions were "crisis in the development of multicultural family" and "general family conflicts"; the mediating condition was "positive self-rationalization"; and the central phenomena were "family-oriented value" and "cultural tolerance." The operation and interaction strategies for them were "forming communicative couple relationships," "cultivating cultural sensibility," and "utilizing unofficial external resources." The adaptation capabilities were "satisfaction with family life" and "pride in building a healthy multicultural family."

• Human Ecology Research
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.109-125
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• 2019

Few studies have utilized observational methods in the field of couple research even though using self-report questionnaires is prone to the subjective biases of the reporter. This study validates the Marital Interaction Coding System-Global (MICS-G), a global version of the well-established microanalytic observational coding system, Marital Interaction Coding System (MICS). Participants in the study consisted of 30 married couples with varied levels of marital adjustment who visited one of the Healthy Family and Multicultural Family Support Centers in Seoul, either for couple therapy or the "Marriage Checkup"program. Ten-minute problem-solving discussions were rated by two undergraduate student raters who were trained for 10 hours. Interobserver agreement based on percentage agreement and intraclass correlation coefficients showed a high level of agreement between raters in establishing interrater reliability. Convergent validity was established by: correlations among marital adjustment, psychological aggression, mental health, and MICS-G categories of conflicts, validation, invalidation, facilitation, and withdrawal. MICS-G categories also were successful in discriminating between distressed and nondistressed couples, which provides evidence of discriminant validity for MICS-G. This study showed that MICS-G is a promising method for researchers to observe couple interactions in a more cost-effective way. Methodological issues and practical applications are also discussed.

• Korean Journal of Family Social Work
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• no.55
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• pp.91-128
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to develop an effective intervention strategy for marriage migrant woman in family therapy. For this purpose, we collected counseling cases of professional counselors who successfully completed counseling and attempted the qualitative analysis of treatment intervention strategies and effects. The results of the study were obtained by dividing the meaning units in the immigrant woman's statements made during the counseling process composed of a total of 6 sessions. The counselors were analyzed to have tried the following intervention strategies. They attempted the following six strategies: Helping emotional differentiation by searching for unresolved emotional problems, dealing with undifferentiation due to family projection process and love triangle, dealing with multi-generational transfer process of the original family relationship patterns and coping mechanism, shedding lihgt on ineffectiveness of inconsistent communication due to emotional oppression applying a communication model of MRI, switching client's awareness through reorganization, suggesting a way of communication that leads to real self. Such counselors' attempts resulted in positive changes and treatment effects were found to include first, cognitive insights and motivation for change, second, improved communication skills and third, anxiety reduction and self-differentiation. Due to their husbands' refusal to participate in counseling, marriage migrant women often get involved in counseling alone, so they tend to worry that the effectiveness of family therapy may be low but it was found that the proper intervention of the counselor could improve the ability of the wife to resolve conflicts, which would be a great help in solving problems such as family violence and this study is meaningful in that it provided the appropriate therapeutic intervention strategies needed.