How Communication with Family Affects Your Life
How Communication with Family Affects Your Life
  • Reporter Kwon Na-eun
  • 승인 2015.05.06 17:33
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How often do you call your family? Does this affect your personal life? Postechians, most of whom live in a dormitory far away from their hometown, especially tend to spend less time with their family compared to other university students. Thus, from Apr. 16 to 23, The Postech Times carried out a survey asking how often Postechians communicate with their family. Also, we had an interview with Choi Seungeh, who is the head of the counselors at the POSTECH Counseling Center, and asked her about the implication of communication with family.
In the survey, 279 students participated. We asked students how often they call and visit their home. For the first question, as you may see in the graph, about 1% answered they never call their home, about 15% answered every day, about 10% answered several times a week, about 52% answered once a week, about 2% answered several times a month, about 15% answered once a month, about 4% answered once every several months, and lastly about 1% answered etc. It seemed that the majority of students call their home once a week.
Also, for the second question "How often do you go home?", about 2.5% answered every weekend, about 9.4% answered once every two to three weeks, about 26% answered once a month, about 32% answered once every two to three months, about 19% answered once a semester, about 6.1% answered once a year, and about 5.4% answered etc. In the survey, some students said they lived abroad so they did not have much choice other than staying in school.
Furthermore, the majority of students agreed that maintaining harmonious relationship with family affects one’s life. Many of them answered it is because their family gives them emotional relief and mental support.
In order to get to know more, we interviewed Choi Seungeh, Head counselor of the Counseling Center. We asked her how and why communicating with family affects one’s personal life. She first mentioned most of the students coming to Counseling Center for the first time do not come for family problems, but they sometimes find out family problems affected them in some ways. Also, she showed an example about the relationship between the likelihood of suicide and support of family. The primary reason for suicide is depression. When a person is in stressful situation, he/she needs coping resources that help to overcome the stress. Among various coping resources, the best is social support, especially emotional support by words of comfort, praise, understanding, and sympathy. Friends, professors, or any other people may provide these, but family members are the main providers. Furthermore, family is important for forming and maintaining self-esteem during stressful situations because one may notice that family will always be there no matter what happens. Last but not least, the way one communicates with his or her family matters. It is important to respect all opinions and emotions from each family member. The key point is to recognize their emotion as they are, without reprimanding the person about how he/she feels. She said it is important to try to change family relationships if one has any problem because family members will be greatly helpful to solve the problem.