A cross-cultural comparison of student social attributions

One hundred sixty American and 397 Korean fourth- and fifth-graders were administered the Student Social Attribution Scale (SSAS). designed to assess students' explanations for social successes and failures. A Korean version of the SSAS was developed for the study. The American and Korean instruments' internal consistency reliability were determined (rs ranged from .56 to .86 for the Korean instrument and .62 to .88 for the American instrument). The means from both the American and Korean SSAS versions on the 8 scales and global scores (e.g., internal, external) were compared. Based on the literature. Korean children should have had higher scores for effort attributions in failure situations than the American children and Americans should have shown higher scores for ability attributions in successful situations. In fact, Korean children did show significantly higher (p < .005) Failure Effort scores and American children showed significantly higher (p < .005) Success Ability scores. Findings indicate that Korean children are potentially more willing to accept responsibility for social failure than American students. (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Inc.