Abstract
With the increasing number of migrants from urban to rural areas in Korea, Population inflow policies have helped increase the number of urban-to-rural migrants which has eased the labor shortage in rural areas.. But, there are new problems in rural areas caused by the "perception gap in regard to harmony, awareness, pride and opportunity to meet" between the urban-to-rural migrants and the original residents. The purpose of this study was to analyze the factors affecting the harmony between the urban-to-rural migrants and residents. A survey was conducted among 70 people living in Hongseong-gun in Chungcheongnam-do with an aim to come up with proposals for policies that can help resolve these social problems in the mutual understanding of urban-to-rural migrants and original residents. An ordered logit model was used to analyze the effect of the perception gap between the urban-to-rural migrants and the rural residents. The result of the survey showed that most of the urban-to-rural migrants believed that the increase in urban-to-rural migrants did not bring harmony to rural areas because of the perception gap. Based on these results, we concluded that the following three policy alternatives would be needed: first, development of urban-to-rural migrant education programs for relatively young men; second, a policy supporting various forms of community gathering in a rural society; third, diversification of urban-to-rural migrant education programs such as communication program and conflict management program, etc.
