ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cultural Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1652737
Acculturative Stress and Achievement Motivation: The Moderating Role of Immigrant Mothers' Korean Proficiency in South Korean Multicultural Adolescents
Provisionally accepted
- 1Sejong University, Gwangjin-gu, Republic of Korea
- 2Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This study explores the impact of acculturative stress, mothers' Korean language proficiency, and their combined effect on the achievement motivation of multicultural students in South Korea. Through hierarchical multiple regression analysis of data from 1,287 ninth-grade multicultural adolescents from the Multicultural Youth Panel Survey (MAPS), the findings show that high acculturative stress is linked to lower achievement motivation. Notably, this decline is more significant when students perceive their mothers' Korean language proficiency to be higher. These findings emphasize the need to critically reassess the effectiveness of current multicultural support policies, which are primarily centered on improving mothers' language proficiency, to better ensure their effectiveness in addressing targeted challenges and achieving meaningful outcomes. Further research is needed to delve deeper into the dynamics of achievement motivation under conditions of high acculturative stress.
Keywords: Acculturative stress, achievement motivation, immigrant mothers, Korean proficiency, maps
Received: 24 Jun 2025; Accepted: 09 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 JIN and Ahn. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Hyun Seon Ahn, Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.