Adolescence is a very important period in personal growth considering the life as a whole and a period when a person tries many things and has many thoughts in an effort to find his or her identity while being asked to adapt to many changes. It is als ...
Adolescence is a very important period in personal growth considering the life as a whole and a period when a person tries many things and has many thoughts in an effort to find his or her identity while being asked to adapt to many changes. It is also a vulnerable stage in life easily exposed to crises. However, adolescents have less resources to overcome crises than adults and are less likely to recognize the need for help and more likely to refuse help intentionally. The seriousness of many problems of maladjustment that reflect the crises of adolescents has been reported through research and broadcasting over the years. Recently, adolescents at risk have been found at younger ages and the society is raising its concerned voices. In Korea, approximately 16% (170,000) of all adolescents are estimated to have crises, and this rate is expected to grow gradually. The number of adolescents at risk has increased while the population of adolescents has decreased continuously, and particularly, the number of adolescents unprotected at school and home and undergoing crises due to media addiction, lack of interpersonal relations, loss of interest in study, school violence, and domestic problems is increasing day by day. Regarding the increase in the number of adolescents at risk, environmental and personal risk factors built up in adolescents while they were not protected by the family or the school are expressed as a variety of external factors and manifested as various external characteristics such as anxiety, depression, anger, inferiority complex, helplessness, violence, and bullying. This phenomenon can lead to a secondary crime or victimization, which can result in a loss of significant human resources in social sense.
In order to minimize such a loss of human resources, it is urgent to help the adolescents at risk understand themselves correctly and improve self-esteem and sense of happiness through various cultural and art experience programs which would guide them to find the special skills they had but not realized, have dreams, and develop aptitude. It is more likely that adolescents to engage in impulsive or unreasonable consumption behaviors due to emotional anxiety or psychological confusion compared to adults even in terms of fashion consumption and personality expression and to regard fashion styling as external adornment that only appear on the outside. Especially, adolescents at risk who have not been carefully protected at home or school are likely to be exposed to the environmental stimuli of society for heaps of time outside of the boundaries of home or school earlier than their peer group in most cases.
This study was determined to give a correct understanding of fashion styling by trying to emotionally communicate with adolescents exposed to risky situations through the medium of fashion and also cultivate cultural literacy through wholesome clothing habit through external self-management program. Through such activities, this study intended motivate adolescents to enhance self-esteem and subjective sense of happiness and adapt to and grow in the family, school, and local community through increased internal and external confidence, wholesome character, and interpersonal relations. This study conducted a qualitative research based on interviews with school teachers and instructors operating external activities about how the management of one’s own appearance influence the changes in subjective happiness and self-esteem by focusing on maladjusted students of two alternative schools and ordinary middle and high schools in Gyeongsangnam-do province.
Happiness refers to a positive emotion that can be felt continuously throughout life such as life satisfaction, good experience, and positive way of thinking. The sense of happiness is the satisfaction that one feels by interpreting and evaluating his or her experience in a positive way and can be defined as the positive emotions that can be felt when one perceives and uses the strengths and resources that he or she has. Many researchers have defined happiness as the satisfaction that we feel about the life as a whole. The happiness in life, particularly during the adolescence, is an important issue that affects the perspective in which the adolescents would look at the world in the future when they grow up. In other words, the adolescents that feel happy in life and those who do not will show a great difference in personality and social adaptability.
The self-esteem refers to the attitude of recognizing the belief in one’s own ability and the value of self-esteem and the psychological variables that are important in the individual's developmental process and adaptation. Although the self-esteem is formed, changed, and developed throughout life, the self-awareness and self-evaluation develop more actively than other stages of development particularly in adolescence, and the adolescents with low self-esteem are faced with more serious behavioral, scholastic, and psychological issues.
I hope the results of this study not only help current adolescents at risk to improve their self-esteem but also become a chance to see the issue of adolescents at risk as a part of social issue instead of limiting the issue as personal or domestic issue by expanding the application scope of the results to adolescents in middle schools and high schools who have the potential of going astray in order to approach the issue on the level of the entire society. A person’s happiness is judged by the value of quality rather than the amount of information given, and the emotion feels such a qualitative value. In other words, the management of their own appearance that can stimulate the emotional aspect of the adolescents at risk will be able to motivate them through the creative experience of special fields relating to fashion, beauty, culture, and art and directly help the search of various jobs and career development. Through this, it will be possible for adolescents to recognize their personality and the concept of self by establishing self-identity and confidence and change perception and attitude toward their own appearance in daily life, helping them to move on to upper grades and start social life. Also, it will improve the worsening issue of adolescents at risk by enhancing self-esteem and reducing negative emotions to promote full social participation and active lifestyle, and it will help adolescents to prepare the basis upon which to adapt to the society in a wholesome way through the recognition of their own bodies and the management of their appearances, change their perception and attitude toward their appearance in everyday living, and participate in the community based on the spirit of care and sharing.