• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.49 no.5
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• pp.33-48
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to explore factors related to marital satisfaction among immigrant wives compared to Korean wives of Korean men. Participants included 409 immigrant wives married to Korean men and 474 Korean wives married to Korean men, both currently living in Korea. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that there were different sets of variables that predicted marital satisfaction for each group. Egalitarian decision-making was a significant predictor of marital satisfaction for immigrant wives only, whereas for Korean wives, it was the level of their depressive symptoms that was significantly but negatively associated with marital satisfaction. A wife's positive perception of her husband's communication style emerged as the strongest predictor of marital satisfaction for both Korean and immigrant wives. In addition, indicators of the cultural context of immigrant women (i.e., longer stay in Korea and greater frequency of experiencing discrimination in the past year due to their foreign appearance or status) emerged as significant predictors of immigrant wives' marital satisfaction even after taking demographic factors, depressive symptoms, and couple-level factors into account. The findings of this study contribute to existing research by (1) comparing the models of marital satisfaction for Korean wives and immigrant wives, identifying unique predictors for each group, and (2) examining the effect of cultural adaptation on the martial satisfaction of immigrant wives.