| Problem. The problem of this study was to determine the difference in spiritual well-being among Korean-American young adults across three stages of ethnic identity development: unexamined, search/moratorium, and achieved ethnic identity in selected churches in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.;Procedures. With a sample size of 123, a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to determine the difference in religious well-being (RWB), existential well-being (EWB), and spiritual well-being (SWB: combination of RWB and EWB) among Korean American young adults across three groups according to the three stages of ethnic identity development: unexamined, search/moratorium, and achieved ethnic identity . Ethnic identity was the independent (categorical) variable and each well-being score was used to investigate the difference among the three groups. Because one-way ANOVAs showed significant differences, post-hoc comparison tests (FLSD) were conducted to investigate which group scored differently from the other two.;Findings and conclusion. The results of the one-way ANOVAs revealed that there were statistically significant differences at the p=.000 level in the religious well-being (RWB), the existential well-being (EWB), and the spiritual well-being (SWB) scores for the three ethnic identity groups. The post-hoc comparison tests (FLSD) indicated that the biggest difference was found between the stage of unexamined ethnic identity and the stage of achieved ethnic identity, while no significant difference was found between the stage of search/moratorium ethnic identity and the stage of achieved ethnic identity, throughout the three tests commonly. This current study was undertaken with the premise that spiritual well-being would differ significantly according to the stages of ethnic identity development of Korean-American young adults. In result, between the stage of unexamined ethnic identity and the stage of achieved ethnic identity, the level of ethnic identity of Korean-American young adults in selected churches in the Dallas-Fort Worth area had associations with spiritual well-being. |
