This article is a comparative research to examine the family perceptions of Koreans, Chinese and Japanese. The family, a human relationship formed by blood ties, has been regarded as a basic unit of social organization which protects and reproduces its members based on love and intimacy. Despite the similarity in blood ties, however, the interaction between the array of social institutions and individuals makes differences in the perception and function of the family in each country.Many scholars have treated East Asia as a 'Confucian family-centred' society. They predict that East Asia would have paternalistic, patriarchal and extended family characteristics influenced by Confucianism. However, little empirical analysis has been done on whether East Asia possesses such common characteristics. This paper is an attempt to verify whether or not this perception is valid by analyzing and comparing the perception of family boundaries of the people in Korea, China and Japan 1 . An individual's perception of family would be affected by the individual's idiosyncratic experience as well as the common culture of a society as a form of family ideology. For these reasons, it is possible that individuals in the same society have different family perceptions based on their own experiences. In addition, individuals with similar backgrounds may have different family perceptions depending on the state's array of social institutions such as pension, eldercare/childcare, and female labour market participation. Because East Asian countries have experienced different pathways of modernisation or post-modernisation, their family experiences may have been formed in different ways. The standard life-course
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.