• Journal of Families and Better Life
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.149-159
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• 2004

An Ethnographic Decision Model (EDM) to explore socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological factors related to the attitudes toward childless family was developed in this study. From college students' protocol writings, this research found that the participants in general had conservative views about childless families. They tended to simplify childless families as either infertile couples or DINK (Double Income No Kids) couples. The participants explained why they decided to have or not to have children in the future. They seemed to believe in a traditional family structure and idealize parental roles, while recognizing the high economic and psychological cost of rearing children. They claimed that Korean society set high standards for parents, which were too difficult to reach. The participants, having been educated to believe in self-actualization through their successful careers, struggled to choose between a family with children and one without children. This study was conducted with a holistic view, and highlighted the importance of interactions between traditional ideology about the family and socioeconomic contexts when interpreting college students' perspectives on childless family.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.141-163
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• 2011

The advancement of information technologies including the Internet has affected the way of social information processing as well as brought about the paradigm shift to the information society. Accordingly, it is very important to study the process of social information processing over the digital media through which social information is generated, distributed, and led to social consensus. In this study, we analyze the mechanism of social information processing, identify a process model of social consensus and institutionalization of the results, and finally propose a set of information processing characteristics on the internet media. We deploy the ethnographic approach to analyze the meaning of group behavior in the context of society to analyze two major events which happened in Korean society. The formation process of social consensus is found to consist of 5 steps: suggestion of social issues, selective reflection on public opinion, acceptance of the issues and diffusion, social consensus, and institutionalization and feedback. The key characteristics of information processing in the Internet is grouped into proactive response to an event, the changes in the role of opinion leader, the flexibility of proposal and analysis, greater scalability, relevance to consensus making, institutionalization and interaction. This study contributes to the literature by proposing a process model of social information processing which can be used as the basis for analyzing the social consensus making process from the social network perspective. In addition, this study suggests a new perspective where the utility of the Internet media can be understood from the social information processing so that other disciplines including politics, communications, and management can improve the decision making performance in utilizing the Internet media.