Minjeong Kim et.al
2016
ABSTRACT
138 Korean American adolescents completed a demographic questionnaire, the revised Stephenson Multigroup Acculturation Scale, the NEO Five-Factor Inventory-3, and Achenbach & Rescorla’s Youth Self Report.
1. Introduction
2. Methods
The sample included Korean American adolescents who were recruited from Korean churches, Korean language schools, Korean shopping malls and restaurants, mental health centers serving Asian and Pacific Islander communities, and websites for the Korean community in California.
The sample included 138 adolescents. 57 participants (41%) were males and 81 were females (59%). The mean age of the participants was 14.43 years (10 - 19 years, SD = 2.09).
Their length of residence in the US ranged from less than 1 to 18 years, with a mean score of 12.36 years (SD = 4.14).
About 61% of the participants reported that “their family had enough money but no extra”, and 36% reported that “they had more money than they need”.
Means and correlations for study variables with continuous scores are shown in Table 1
Table 1. Means and correlations for age, length of time in the US, acculturation, personality traits, and total mental health problems.
Length of residence in the US was the only demographic variable that was significantly correlated with mental health problems.
Table 2. Effects of time in the US, acculturation, and personality traits on mental health problems.
presents findings for Aim 1.
Although length of residence in the US was correlated with mental health in the bivariate analysis, it was not a significant predictor when scores for acculturation and all personality traits were entered in the second step. Consistent with preliminary bivariate correlations, only the 2 personality traits of neuroticism and agreeableness were significant predictors of mental health problems for the adolescents. Neuroticism (β = .63, p < .001) was positively associated with mental health problems, while agreeableness (β = −.18, p < .01) was negatively associated with mental health problems. The total model explained 52.6% of the variance in mental health problems (F (7, 115) = 18.24, p < .001).