Legal Precarity, Discrimination, and School Withdrawal: How Structural Stressors Undermine School Adjustment Among Foreign-National Children in Korea

초록

This study examines the effects of legal status insecurity (LSI) and perceived discrimination (PD) on school adjustment among children of foreign-national families—defined as those in which both parents are nationals of foreign countries—who are subject to structural legal vulnerability under South Korea’s jus sanguinis-based nationality law. It also investigates the mediating role of social withdrawal (SW) in these relationships. The study analyzes sixth-wave data (2024) from the second cohort of the Multicultural Adolescent Panel Study (MAPS, n = 251) using simple mediation analysis via SPSS PROCESS Macro v.5.0 (Model 4) with 5,000 bootstrap iterations to test both direct and indirect effects. Results revealed that LSI exerted a significant negative direct effect on school adjustment and a significant indirect effect through SW, while PD demonstrated a strong negative direct effect as well as a significant indirect effect via SW. These findings confirm SW as a psycho-behavioral mediator linking both stressors to school maladjustment. While the indirect effect of LSI on school adjustment via SW is statistically significant, its magnitude is modest, and the pathway should not be interpreted as evidence of a dominant mechanism. The study argues that, for children of foreign-national families navigating structural legal vulnerability in South Korea, LSI and PD, while both structurally generated, operate through distinct mechanisms and require differentiated policy responses, and identifies SW as a partial mediating pathway through which structural disadvantage is converted into institutional disengagement.

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