Thesis (M.A.)--Chulalongkorn University, 2013

This paper examines friend’s quality preference of Korean people, in comparison with that of Chinese and Japanese to shed light on their friend selection tendencies. Given the fact that reasons why people choose someone as friends but not others depends on many objective and subjective factors, the psychological, biological, and sociological approaches are applied for the study in an effort to understand how some biological factors such as sex and age and sociological factors such as education, current working status, and religion impact on the preference of Koreans. This research project hypothesizes that there are some quality that Korean people prefer in friends, including spiritual ones such as being honest, responsible, warm- hearted, loyal, cultured, and intelligent and material ones such as being wealthy and powerful, in which the former outweighs the latter for Korean preference. The opposite is true for Chinese and Japanese. The biological and sociological factors have strong effects on their liking to friend’s quality. Using the dataset of East Asian Social Survey (EASS) in 2008, this study examines the extent to which Koreans prefer specific qualities of friends. The results confirm that Korean people value spiritual qualities more than material qualities. In addition, the variations of friend’s quality preference of Korean people by the biological factors and sociological factors are significant.