A cross-cultural comparison of student social attributions

One hundred sixty American and 397 Korean elementary school children were administered the Student Social Attribution Scale (SSAS), designed to assess students explanations for social successes and failures; the SSAS assesses individual differences in social attributions. A Korean version of the SSAS was developed and used to compare the social attributions of Korean and American fourth and fifth graders. The American And Korean instruments’ internal consistency reliability were determined (r’s ranged from.56 to .86 for the Korean instrument and .62 to .88 for the American instrument). Themeans from both the American and Korean SSAS versions on the eight scales (success and failure ability, effort, luck and task difficulty indices) and global scores (e.g., internal.external) were compared. Based on the literature, Korean children should have shown greater Failure Effort scores than the American children and Americans should have shown higher Success Ability scores. In fact, Korean children did show significantly higher (p<.005) Failure Effort scores and American children showed significantly higher(p<.005) Success Ability scores. Apparently, Koreans are more willing to accept responsibility for failure than American students.