Korean institutionalized adolescents' attributions of success and failure in interpersonal relations and perceived loneliness

Since the end of 1990's, Korea has faced significant family break-ups and institutionalization of children due to nationwide economical crisis and dramatic increase of divorce. The long-term effects of institutionalization to adolescents' psychological trait have become important theme in developmental studies. This study examines loneliness and attributional styles in interpersonal relations of the two groups: 97 institutionalized adolescents who live in welfare facilities and 105 of their age-mates from middle class backgrounds. Our results demonstrate that the institutionalized adolescents tend to show higher levels of loneliness than the home-reared group. In addition, the former group displays a non-self-serving cognitive style of attributing failures in social situations to more stable and global causes than the latter. Non-self-serving attributions about interpersonal relations are more closely related with higher levels of loneliness. Among the three dimensions of attribution (that is, ‘internal/external’, ‘stable/unstable’, and ‘global/specific’), the ‘internal/external’ attribution is the least related to loneliness. A regression analysis shows that the institutionalized adolescents' attribution of failure to global reasons and the home-reared adolescents' attribution of success to unstable reasons can predict loneliness. The implications of these findings on the development of attribution-retraining program for institutionalized adolescents are discussed below.