Daeun Kim, a doctoral candidate in Human Development and Family Studies, has been selected as a recipient of the Dean’s Institutional Access Small Grant from the College of Social Science, and selected to receive the Richard Kichu & Joan Sojeon Moon Scholarship in the amount of $1,000 from the Council on Korean Studies at MSU’s Asian Studies Center. The grant will support her dissertation research, and the prestigious scholarship recognizes her outstanding efforts to promote Korean culture and her academic achievements.
“Research on ethnic-racial socialization has predominantly focused on U.S.-born racial and ethnic-racial minority families,” Kim said. “Although this work is valuable, relatively few studies have centered migration as a key context shaping how families understand and communicate about ethnicity and race.”
Kim’s research addresses this gap by considering both pre-migration histories and cultural experiences and post-migration sociopolitical contexts and racialization.
“By bringing these contexts together, I examine how immigrant families come to understand the meaning of race and ethnicity in the United States and how these understandings shape family socialization and youth development,” she said.
Kim’s dissertation is titled “Reciprocal Ethnic-Racial Socialization in Korean American Immigrant Families.”
“As part of this broader research program, my dissertation examines Korean American immigrant families living in the Midwest, where co-ethnic communities and resources are relatively limited,” she explained. “I investigate how Korean immigrant parents and their adolescent children navigate ethnic-racial dynamics, Korean and American identities, and their ongoing adaptation to U.S. society. The grant and the scholarship will support the collection of in-depth interview data, allowing me to center families’ own perspectives and experiences. The study will also demonstrate the value of examining specific ethnic groups within the broader Asian American population, rather than relying solely on a pan-ethnic approach that may obscure important differences in migration histories, community contexts, and racialization experiences.”