The effect of the Family Acculturation and Communication Workshop upon family satisfaction and parent-adolescent communication among selected Korean parents

Problem. The problem of this study is to determine the effect of the Family Acculturation and Communication Workshop (FACW) upon family satisfaction and parent-adolescent communication among selected Korean parents in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.Procedures. The subjects were fifty Korean parents in the Dallas-Fort Worth area: twenty-five parents from First Korean Baptist Church of Lewisville, Flower Mound, Texas and twenty-five parents from Hanuri Baptist Church, Carrollton, Texas. The participants were randomly assigned to either an experimental group or a control group. They formed two experimental groups and two control groups. The design of this study was experimental in nature using a post-test only control group. After the experimental groups attended the FACW, the Family Satisfaction Scale and the Parent-Adolescent Communication Scale were administered to all participants. The FACW was a three-session workshop designed for increasing an understanding of acculturation, reducing parent-adolescent acculturation differences, and improving communication skills between parents and their adolescent children. Each session included a one-hour lecture, one-hour experiential exercises, and offered week-day assignments. Two t-tests for independent samples were conducted to determine if any mean differences existed between the combined experimental group and the combined control group. Two one-way ANOVAs were also run to check if there were any mean differences among the four groups.Findings and conclusion. The FACW was effective in improving family satisfaction of the combined experimental group. The FSS mean score of the combined experimental group was significantly higher than that of the combined control group at alpha = .05 level. However, the FACW was not significantly helpful in improving parent-adolescent communication of the experimental group. The PACS mean score of the experimental group was not significantly higher than that of the control group at alpha = .05 level. An additional finding was that the FACW was helpful in increasing both the level of family satisfaction and the level of parent-adolescent communication perceived by the experimental group when two divorced participants in the experimental group were excluded from a data analysis. There were no significant mean differences on the FSS and the PACS among the four different groups.