This study examines the career development of immigrant youth in South Korea using a topic modeling approach to synthesize empirical Korean-language research.
Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) was applied to 133 peer-reviewed articles extracted from the Korea Citation Index.
The analysis identified the following six primary themes: (1) career barriers and psychological factors, (2) caregiver influences on career development, (3) career support policies and interventions, (4) psychosocial factors shaping multicultural youths' career attitudes, (5) educational trajectories of indigenous and immigrant youth, and (6) family factors and career maturity. These themes collectively illustrate the complex interplay among micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors that influence immigrant youths' career outcomes within South Korea's unique sociocultural and policy context.
This study makes two original contributions. First, it introduces a systematic, LDA-based synthesis of Korean-language empirical literature on immigrant youth career development, rendering a substantial and previously inaccessible evidence base visible to international scholarship. Second, it substantively challenges the Western-centric dominance of career development theory by demonstrating how East Asian sociocultural structures, family dynamics, and state policy configurations produce distinct career development pathways, offering a transferable analytical framework for researchers and policymakers in other non-Western or rapidly diversifying societies.
