The Staratification of Korean Parents’ Anxiety about Children’s Education: Focusing on the Mediating Effect of Peceived Fairness

[Purpose] The purpose of this study is to define the anxiety of Korean parents regarding their children's education as a subtype of social anxiety and to analyze the factors influencing it. In particular, this study explores how parental education and income in Korean society affect anxiety about children's education and further investigates whether this relationship is mediated by parents' perceptions of fairness. [Methods] Using data from the 7th wave of the World Values Survey (WVS Wave 7) for Korea, a one-way ANOVA was conducted to examine whether there are differences in the level of anxiety about children's education based on parental education and income, thereby identifying the stratification of such anxiety. Next, a multinomial logistic regression analysis was performed to determine whether parental education and income continue to influence anxiety about children's education even after controlling for various influencing factors. Lastly, to verify whether the relationship between parental education and income and anxiety about children's education is mediated by parents' perceptions of fairness, PROCESS (Model 4; Hayes, 2012) was used. [Results] The results of the one-way ANOVA showed that as parental education increases, anxiety about children's education also increases, whereas higher parental income tends to reduce this anxiety. The multinomial logistic regression analysis revealed that anxiety about children's education among Korean parents is more influenced by income than education, and that age, residential area size, extroversion, religiosity, and subjective health status also have significant effects. Mediation analysis confirmed that the relationship between parental income and anxiety about children's education is partially mediated by perceptions of fairness in income and asset distribution, as well as fairness in educational, employment, and promotion opportunities. [Conclusion] The findings of this study demonstrate that anxiety about children's education in contemporary Korean society is stratified by income and that this anxiety can be interpreted as a negative emotional response arising from lower perceptions of social fairness. Based on these results, the limitations of this study and directions for future research are also discussed.