Korea ESL Survey – Part 2: Lifestyle and Pets

This is the second post in a series on the Native English Speaking Teaching community in Korea.  The previous post contains downloadables and can be found here: Survey Results – Part 1: Dating.

Nabunu needs people who can help out (think blogging, etc), check out what we need here: http://nabunu.com/nabunu-whats-in-it-for-you/

So the past survey dealt with the dating and relationship side of life for Native English Speaking Teachers (NESTs).  Today we’ll deal with the stats on drinking, smoking, exercise, pets, language ability and K-Pop.  This is all a part of easing in to the results of the survey I conducted.  Without further ado…

Drinking, Smoking & Exercise

Smoking

72% (78% for women, 67% for men) of respondents are non-smokers which means that the rest, around 27% (22% for women, 33% for men), smoke to some extent.  I’m not sure how official government or NGO stats define what a smoker is but this Wikipedia article gives some interesting stats on what percentage of Koreans smoke (50% for Korean men, 4% for Korean women) although my guess is that in this instance there’s some self-reporting going on here that seems questionable.

That means that Korean men (if the Wikipedia statistics are to be believed) are 1.5 times more likely to smoke than NEST men.  By these same figures NEST women are five times more likely to smoke than Korean women.  One of the likely reasons Korean men have high smoking rates (it was 70-80% in the year 2000 apparently) is due to military service.  For young guys ripped from the bossom of the PC bang and thrust into the man’s man world of the army it can be hard to find a way to fit in.  Smoking would be one way of proving that you’re ‘one of the boys’ as we say here in Australia.  I could also see there being a lot of peer pressure Korean social harmony reasons for doing so as well.

Exercise

NESTs also appear to be pretty active when it comes to health and fitness.  Around 69% (72% for men, 65% for women) claimed to exercise twice a week or more which should be heartening to gym owners.  I don’t know what national averages are for Korea or other countries.

Drinking

On the whole I didn’t find the results from the question on alcohol very interesting except that a lot of respondents classified themselves as “Social” drinkers (35%) although that term means different things to different people.

Pets, Language Ability & K-Pop

Pets

I guess I was a bit surprised how many NESTs are pet owners – about 20%.  I reckon this means that a lot of people who chose to take my survey to begin with are in this for the long haul or have been in Korea a while and feel more invested in the community.  This would make them more likely to see the benefits of taking part in a survey (I’m basing this not just on this result but on other results, like the average number of months respondents have lived in Korea which was a massive 39 months).

The surprise for me is that man’s best friend has also wormed its way into the hearts of the fairer gender as 13% of women own one dog or more whereas the same number for men is 8%.  Oh and apparently 2 people own rabbits with one person owning a hamster and another a hedgehog, so there you go.

Korean Language Ability

Language ability was mixed with “Bar/Restaurant/Taxi Korean” getting the largest response (22% overall, 25% for women, 19% for men).  In general women reported lower Korean language ability than men but this could also be because, in general, men tend to be more overconfident when they’re incorrect when estimating their abilities than women.  I’m just sayin’.

K-Pop

When it came to listening to K-Pop, only 22% of women said they had never listened to it as opposed to 40% of men.  Men’s results were heavily skewed towards not listening whereas women’s results were pretty evenly distributed among all the listening options.  So, Korean music industry, when you go into foreign markets, start with the women.

Conclusion

OK, so not the most earth-shattering results but it looks like, on the whole, you NESTs are a fairly outgoing bunch.

Next Post: In Part 3 we’ll look at the experience NESTs have and we’ll compare the answers of hakwon teachers with public school teachers.  We’ll also look at the resources they have available.

Question: How important is it for NESTs to learn Korean and should the Korean government offer more assistance to help teach NESTs how to speak Korean?

Photo credit (Dog pic): ratterrell via photopin cc