Although the rate of unwed-mothers who decided to raise their baby by themselves has been substantially increasing last 10 years there are still a number of challenges for unwed-mothers such as financial difficulties, parenting stress and discrimination. No previous studies have statistically explored the effect of discrimination experience on unwed-mothers’ life. This dissertation thus aimed to investigate the relationship between discrimination experience and subjective well-being for unwed-mothers and examined whether social capital mediated this association.
The data were collected through a survey and a total of 310 unwed-mothers registered with 3 associations for unwed-mothers participated in the study. To analyse the data descriptive statistics, factor analysis, analysis of variance were conducted by using SPSS Statistics 25.0 and the hierarchial regression analysis of Baron and Kenny(1986) was used to verify the mediation effect of social capital.
The results were as follow: first, among demographic characteristics jobs and monthly income had a statistically significant association with all the variables. unwed-mothers who work full-time and earn more than 1,500,000 won have more discrimination experience and higher level of subjective well-being as well as more participation and trust in social capital. However, jobless unwed-mothers whose monthly income is less than 500,000 won have more networks than others. Second, discrimination experience of unwed-mothers had a negative effect on subjective well-being. Lastly, networks among components of social capital mediated the relationship between discrimination experience and subjective well-being and no mediating effect of participation and trust appeared.
The results suggest that discrimination experience and networks of unwed-mothers are determinants of subjective well-being. For higher level of subjective well-being for unwed-mothers decreasing discrimination against unwed-mothers and increasing the amount of networks are necessary. There could be campaigns focusing on unwed-mothers’parenting, not on ‘unwed’ state to lower prejudice toward unwed-mothers. Moreover, social networks for unwed-mothers could be expanded by encouraging them to participate in self-groups in terms of parenting where they have a wonderful rapport and complement each other.