In recent years, the importance of self-acceptance for adolescents’ emotional well-being and interpersonal
relationship has been emphasized. The purpose of this research was to examine the mediating effect of
inferiority in the relationship between the quality of adolescent-caregiver communication and self-acceptance.
Three hundred-seventeen high school students from Seoul and Gyeonggi-do were surveyed. The measures
used were the Parent-Adolescent Communication Scale (Min, 1991), the Inferiority Scale (Kim, 1995), and
the Self-Acceptance Scale (Park, 1986). Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, confirmatory factor
analysis, and structural equation modeling were performed to analyze the data using IBM SPSS 22.0 and
Amos 22.0. The mediation effect was tested by Sobel test. The results revealed that the adolescents’
perceived level of adaptive communication with their caregivers had a significant direct effect on the level
of their self-acceptance as well as a significant indirect effect through inferiority. In other words, the higher
the adolescents’ perceived level of adaptive communication with their caregivers was, the lower their
inferiority was, and in turn, the higher the adolescents’ inferiority was, the lower their self-acceptance was.
This study examined individual and family relational factors and the pathways that affect self-acceptance of
high school students. The results provide valuable insights for developing therapeutic and educational
intervention programs to decrease inferiority and promote the self-acceptance of adolescents as well as for
parent education and counseling for enhancing the quality of adolescent-caregiver communication.
Key words : high school students, self-acceptance, adolescent-caregiver communication, inferiority, mediation effect