The Hub of Sparkle!

Over the last couple of weeks I have been running a survey in an attempt to see what’s going on in the Foreigner community here in Seoul.

It is a very small sample – though not restricted to E2 Visa holders it equates to about 1% of the 20000 Language teachers in Korea. Neither should it be taken as an impartial poll – the questions were not checked for bias before the survey started (and indeed some changed during the survey as well), and of course the subjects were self-selecting.

So as an instrument for data gathering it is flawed.

I think it does however give us an interesting snapshot about who we as a population group are, where we come from, what we do, and where we might be heading.

The data collected is thus presented here with out too much clarification or interpretation. You may use it / reproduce it if you wish under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.

First the more objective statistical type things:

Gender Breakdown

Age

Nationality

Length of Stay in Korea

Visa Status

Place of Work

So we might extrapolate that your average foreigner teacher in Korea is Male and aged between 26 and 30, hails from The United States, has been here 2 years, holds an E2 visa and Works at a Hakwon. (I think I skewed the results in terms of workplace by emailing all my fellow elementary school teachers and getting them to fill in the survey).

The second part of the survey asked less scientific questions. Nevertheless they provide some interesting results. The first Question asked:

Why did you come to Korea?

Where do you get most of your information on happenings in Korea?

(People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.)

It is no real surprise that K-Blogland features greatly in how people get their info about what’s going on in Korea such as events, festivals and news etc.

Which, if any, of these blogs / sites have you visited in the last month?

(People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.)

List any Korean related magazines you read.

Along with the usual sources the survey also looked at other media – in particular Magazines that are based in and are about Korea. It pretty much confirmed what I already thought – in that GROOVE and the more recent 10 Magazine are popular sources of information, and there is a niche being filled in Daegu and Busan with Daegu Pockets and Busan Haps respectively, there are obviously a number of other – probably smaller print run magazines out there that people are reading.

Two questions asked survey participants to rank the sense of “community” the feel as an expat in Korea.

(1 – no community, 5 – a super connected community.)

And also to rank the adequacy of services available to them as expats in Korea:

(1 – inadequate, 5 – more than adequate)

When it comes to potential activities that Expats would like to get involved in with other Expats it seems there is an untapped market in Korean movies with English subtitles (despite the best efforts of Paul at Hub of Sparkle.)

Finally survey participants were asked for suggestions on what services they missed, weren’t available to them or could be improved. A number stand out including:

An English version of Naver.com, and related to that the extension of the Korean Real Name System to Expats. (i.e. getting your Alien Number to work when registering for Korean sites).

A centralised “clearing house” for government information, forms and procedures in English. While these things are available, in English, they are often wide spread across The Internet. And in a similar vein:

“Clear legal advice, particularly related to visas, assistance setting up basic accounts and financial transactions, greater compliance with international standards for internet and telecom”

Which is a running theme among all the comments left along with better access to Korean Language classes. But apparently things are better than they have been:

Things are SOOO much better than when I first came here, but still don’t compare to the services Koreans could enjoy if they traveled to Western countries…

and

Other than being an ugly white guy who can now f**k model-quality Korean chicks, not too much.

There’s always one isn’t there.

Suicide booths

Ok – there’s always one, or two, isn’t there.

Another theme seems to be better access to legal advice in English. Predictably about labour related issues, but also things like trusts, investments and wills

So there you have it. An interesting snapshot of our “Community” at one point in time. Like I say it is not the most perfect instrument of data collection, but in lieu of a Government Census, which foreigners seemed to be left out of anyway, it’s a start.

Now for those in the know to put some of this data to work….

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