The Korea Local Administration Review

This study aims to examine factors influencing multicultural family, especially marriage immigrant women’s life satisfaction and provide policy implications. For that purpose, this study first reviews the related literature and creates a research framework, which is composed of internal and external factors. The internal factor includes socio-demographic, family, social factors, whereas the external factor includes institutional and local environmental factors. Then, a survey was employed for marriage immigrant women in Jeon-nam area, and a total of 494 responses were collected and used to conduct multivariate regression analysis.
The results show that family and local environmental factors have relatively larger influences to marriage immigrant women’s life satisfaction. In particular, the understanding and openness of local community member to multicultural family and society is proved to have the largest effect. This result points out the limitation of current studies which usually focus on marriage immigrant women from psychological and private dimension at the individual and family levels. By empirically analyzing the significance of the local environmental factor, the study argues that multicultural policy should further focus on the role of local society, considering how to enhance the understanding and openness of local community members to multicultural family and multicultural society.

□ Keywords: multicultural family, marriage immigrant women, life satisfaction, multivariate regression analysis