The share of the South Korean population living alone has substantially increased over the last four decades, sparking public concerns about loneness and its broader effects on individuals and society. In this talk Dr. Hyunjoon Park analyzes trends in living alone in Korea from 1980 to 2020. Analyses show a divergence in solo living between those with more and less education in both younger and older age groups but in oppositive directions. Among young men and women aged 25-34, those with a bachelor’s degree or higher are increasingly more likely to live alone than their peers with a high school education or less. In contrast, among older adults aged 65-74, individuals with the lowest level of education are increasingly more likely to live alone. Dr. Park discusses the implications of solo living trends for family dynamics and inequality in Korea.

Hyunjoon Park is Korea Foundation Professor of Sociology and Director of the James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Park is interested in family and social stratification in cross-national comparative perspective, focusing on South Korea and other East Asian societies. He has studied changes in marriage, divorce, and living arrangements as well as consequences of demographic and economic trends for education, well-being, and socioeconomic outcomes of children, adolescents, and young adults in Korea. He was the director of the Korean Millennials Research Lab, a multiyear and multidisciplinary project team tasked with investigating the transition to adulthood among young adults in South Korea and Korean Americans in the US. His publications include the single-authored book Re-Evaluating Education in Japan and Korea: De-mystifying Stereotypes (Routledge, 2013); the coauthored book Diversity and the Transition to Adulthood in America (University of California Press, 2022), and the coedited volume Korean Families Yesterday and Today (University of Michigan Press, 2020). 

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