A Study of Solo-Livers in Eastern Asia: an Eye on Japan, China and South Korea

Abstract

The article examines how the processes of individualization (which in the modern world lead to many social changes, including lifestyle changes) alter the attitude to the need to start a family. Such processes also lead to the emergence of such phenomenon as "solo-living", but the analysis of the existing studies has shown that the growth of singles has not been researched in global comparative studies. The authors analyze how the problem of singles' growth in East Asian countries (with the focus on Japan, China and South Korea) is considered. Asian studies show that the lifestyle of single people is dictated by several reasons: lack of free time due to work (imbalance between work and life outside it), opposition of young people to official policies of their countries (social policy is aimed at supporting family traditions) and support for such lifestyle by marketing companies (the market is increasingly focused on singles in these countries). Prospects for further research include considering confrontation of social policies of the states and market policy on the issue of solo-living and the analysis of local studies of solo-living.

Antecedents of the Attitudes Toward Singlehood Among Young Adults in Malaysia, Japan, and India

“…Elsewhere, while studying social status brought by rising global singlehood, the concept of "Sampo Generation" is seen mushrooming in Korea whereby its neologism in South Korea refers to singles that decline courtship, marriage, and childbearing. With financial stability, health, and work surpassing the singles' needs for traditional family making (Jang, 2021), a similar Korean solo-living lifestyle is also observed in other East Asian countries like Japan and China (Muradyan and Yashkina, 2020).…”

“…The results are expected to yield more underlying reasons for young adults' attitudes toward staying single. Moreover, this cross-cultural research done across three Asian countries could overcome the scarcity of global comparative studies on the growing trend of singlehood studies (Muradyan and Yashkina, 2020) whenever cultural variations exist (Apostolou et al, 2021). Evidently, the IMC model of Rusbult et al (2011) has been used in studies involving non-Western samples, for instance the Chinese population in the study of Lin and Rusbult (1995), the Taiwanese samples in the study of Le and Agnew (2001) as well as the Chinese and Japanese population in the study of Apostolou et al (2021).…”

Дослідження Життя Соло У Країнах Північної Та Південної Європи

“…За даними 2019 р., з однієї людини складалося 39 % домогосподарств (Eurostat, 2020). Найбільша кількість таких одинаків проживає в Європейському Союзі та країнах Азії (Muradyan, Yashkina, 2020).…”