A Personal Attitude Construct Analysis of Japanese Mothers in International Marriages

<p>　　The purpose of the current study was to reveal the attitude structure of Japanese mothers who are raising children with non-Japanese partners. Attitudes of four Japanese mothers who were raising young children with an American, British, or French husband were examined via a personal attitude construct (PAC) analysis. Participants were presented with a dendrogram (a tree diagram) based on a cluster analysis of the distance matrix derived from the participants' perception of the degree of similarity among associated items as well as a distance model of multidimensional scaling. PAC analysis indicated that attitudes varied among the participants despite some similarities. A major common factor was that participants all placed their children at the center of their lives and they all perceived raising bi-racial children in a positive light. However, three main types of contexts were found to contribute to participants' current attitudes: social contexts, family contexts, and individual contexts. Social contexts include pressure from outside the family or from Japanese society, which can be perceived as exclusionary against individuals with different characteristics. Family contexts refer to the bi-cultural environment at home, family cohesiveness, and economic circumstances. Examples of individual contexts include the influence of one's parents, one's personality, and unfulfilled desires. When assistance is provided to multicultural families, the multiple layers of context within which family members operate need to be discerned while being open and sensitive to factors pertinent to their multicultural environment along with factors that are common to all families.</p>