#  Aimee Choi, '27, Government, KI Undergraduate Research Assistantship, Summer 2024 

 





September 04, 2024

 

 

     ![Aimee Choi](/sites/g/files/omnuum10896/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/face_shot_aimee_choi.jpg?h=a8f9f43b&itok=MundXiol) 

 



 

 **Faculty Project: Gender-Role Attitudes and Daily Lives of Highly-Educated Korean Men and Women  
Faculty Director: Prof. Mary Brinton**

 This summer, I assisted Professor Brinton with her research by translating and coding interview transcripts of around 100 women and men from Seoul and Busan. These long, structured interviews aimed to capture the Korean public’s attitudes and feelings toward gender roles, marriage, and Korean society, especially in light of Korea’s declining marriage and birth rates in recent decades. As someone who wanted to learn more about the changing social landscape in Korea in an academic context, I was excited to explore a macro-level phenomenon through a micro-level, personal lens while silmutaneously practicing my translation skills.

 The excerpts I translated included the interviewees’ opinions on gender essentialism, ideal family arrangements, and Korea’s low marriage and birth rates. The translation process pushed me to be attentive to the details and nuance of language, considering that correctly interpreting culture-specific idioms and expressions in English required a deep understanding of those expressions. The audio files of the interviews also allowed me to pick up on an interviewee’s tone when I came across a sentence with an ambiguous meaning. In addition to translation work, I was able to practice analysis by manually coding the interviewees’ responses, identifying the most frequently mentioned ideas for each question and searching for gender-specific trends. For some questions, I put these results into words by writing memos.

 While qualitative research can take many different forms, I am grateful to have gained experience with one of them and, by doing so, broaden my understanding of the social sciences. Not only did I earn a glimpse of the multifaceted reasons behind Koreans’ hesitance to get married or raise more children, but I was also able to situate the current phenomenon in a larger historical and cultural context to consider what the future of the country holds. Overall, this assistantship was an engaging experience that has left me with a stronger interest in further pursuing qualitative research and uncovering more of Korea’s unique sociological landscape.



 

 

 



 

 See also:- [ Undergraduate ](/audience/undergraduate)
- [ Student Reflection ](/news-type/student-reflection)
 
 

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