A Study on the Differences of Unification Consciousness Using Moral Foundation Theory

Abstract

This article is to analyze the unification consciousness of liberals and conservatives about the unification problem. To this purpose, the writer asked the subjects regarding which political position they take, including liberal and conservative views indirectly with the Moral Foundation Theory. 79 experts, who have majored in moral philosophy and 1,200 common citizens were subjected to investigation. The total number of participants is 1,279. The investigation used a face-to-face survey to the common citizens, and an online survey to the experts. Structured questionnaires were exploited as a research tool. This paper extracted only a few topics of the questionnaire as follows: current inter-Korean relations, inter-Korean policy satisfaction level of current regime, necessity for unification, unified way, and so on. The survey for common citizens has a 95-percent confidence level with a sampling error of plus or minus 2.83. The complete enumeration survey was conducted for 442 experts, who have e-mail addresses and are members of the Korean Ethics Studies Association at the same time. Only 79 members gave an answer to this survey: rate of response was 17.9%. The survey period was from September 23 to October 8. Followed by editing-coding-key-in-programming, collected survey data was analyzed with statistical package, SPSS PC+ (ver12.0). According to the research result, understanding difference in accordance with an individual political position appears more clearly rather than position difference of liberals and conservatives in accordance with objective criteria for inter-Korean relations and unification problem.