Preamble

Since engagement with the K-Wave in the Anglosphere seems to have been something of a theme recently (see here for something on media engagement in the UK and here for online engagement in the US), let’s continue on that path looking at how engagement with the K-Wave has impacted the conceptualisation of Korea in the UK. Specifically, we’ll look at the representation of K-Wave terms in surveys on concepts associated with Korea and how this has changed over the last several years.

The Data

The data we analyse here is drawn from the Korea Foundation (KF)’s large-scale survey 해외한류실태조사 (roughly, The Overseas K-Wave Status Survey), which has been running at more-or-less regular annual intervals since 2012. From early surveys of just 3,600 respondents over 9 countries, the survey has grown to take in 25,000 respondents in 26 countries in its most recent (2024) iteration. Since the sixth iteration of the survey, works containing much more granular data about responses for each country have been published alongside summary reports. The can be found by clicking through for the relevant year here.

While the survey has been carried out with commendable regularity, its content has been a little less consistent. Due to this, we will restrict ourselves to the years for which we have granular information about survey responses and munge the data slightly to ensure consistency across years. The data manipulation consisted of collapsing the concepts which were disambiguated in some surveys, but not others. For example, we combine the concepts ‘Korean Beauty Products’ and ‘Korean Beauty Services’, where they appear separately in later surveys, into the single ‘K-Beauty’ category of earlier surveys.

The question used to elicit the concepts from survey respondents was reported most recently in the 2024 survey as taking the form:

귀하는 한국에 대해 생각해본다면, 가장 먼저 떠오르는 것은 무엇입니까? 그다음으로 떠오르는 것은요?

or to put it another way:

When you think about Korea, what is the first thing that occurs to you? How about the next thing after that?

Although we note that this is an ad hoc translation as we do not have access to the precise form of the question in the local languages in which the survey was carried out including the relevant English translation for the UK respondents to whom we restrict ourselves here.

Top 10 Concepts Associated with Korea

Despite the slight inconsistency between surveys noted above, it has been possible to put together lists of the ten concepts most associated with Korea by the largest proportions of UK survey respondents for the sixth to thirteenth iterations of the survey, which we will understand here as corresponding to the years 2017 to 2024.

As this covers eight years, there are 80 spots available, but the number of concepts which respondents associated most strongly with Korea was a much smaller, less varied set. In fact, only 17 concepts account for the top ten concepts associated with Korea (in terms of being most strongly associated with Korea by the largest proportion of respondents from the UK) over the eight years of the survey which we examine here. They may be seen, scaled for size according to their frequency of inclusion in the top ten and coloured according to their relationship with the K-Wave (black words are unrelated to the K-Wave, pink words are related), in the wordcloud below:

In the below wordcloud, we weight each concept by the sum of its inverse positional rank for each of its appearances in the top ten. For example, concepts put forward by the largest proportion of respondents in a given year receive a weight of 10, those that are put forward by the second largest proportion of respondents receive a 9, etc. Those that do not appear in the top ten in a given year are scored 0 for that year.

Examining these wordclouds allows us to identify concepts which appear with greater frequency in the top ten as well as those which are more highly ranked in general over the period under consideration here.

The K-Wave in the Top 10

We now turn our attention away from the concepts themselves to the broader category of the K-Wave. Over the surveyed period, it is clear that Korea came to be associated more strongly with concepts that also relate to the K-Wave. This can be seen in the increase in the proportion of concepts related to the K-Wave in the top ten concepts associated with Korea, visualised in the graph below.

As with the wordclouds, we also consider the top ten concepts associated with Korea appearing in each of the surveyed years when they are weighted for their inverse positional ranks. In this case, the maximum score of 55 (the sum of all scores from 10 to 1) would be achieved if all concepts reported by respondents either related exclusively to the K-Wave or if none related to the phenomenon. The below graph reflects a proportional increase in the association of Korea with the K-Wave that is broadly consistent with that which is evident just from taking the raw number of K-Wave concepts in the top ten into account.

The final graph considers the relative percentatges of respondents to most strongly associate Korea with one of the top ten concepts and any concept outside of that set. The top ten concepts are further broken down by whether they are related to the K-Wave or not.

Here, we can see a general tendency for growth in the proportion of respondents to associate Korea most strongly with a concept outside of the top ten. This is particularly interesting as it suggessts a more general increase in awareness of Korea and in the diversity of concepts associated with it. That is, rather than an ever-increasing proportion of respondents associating Korea with a very small number of highly-ranked concepts, the proportion of respondents to most strongly associate Korea with a less widely known concept is rising. Questions such as whether these less widely known concepts are related to the K-Wave or what distribution of respondents associating each of the concepts which fall outside of the top ten might be are matters for future investigation.

We also see growth in the proportion of respondents most strongly associating Korea with a concept related to the K-wave within the top ten. This, of course, further demonstrates the increasing association between Korea and its contemporary popular culture in the minds of UK respondents, with a headline finding that over the last seven years for at least one in four respondents, the concepts they most strongly associate with Korea is also related to the K-Wave.

Conclusions

This report demonstrates simply that the K-Wave is playing an increasingly large role in the conceptualisation of Korea in the UK. From around one in ten people most strongly associating some K-Wave concept with the county in 2017, it is now typically around one in four people who do so. This has not only arisen from greater awareness of a specific field, as we see a parallel growth in the number of different K-Wave concepts appearing in the top ten concepts associated with Korea. This rose from just 2 in 2017 to four or more since 2020. We may also speculate that the K-Wave is a factor in an increase in a general awareness of Korea and a diversity of concepts related to it. The specific concepts which have given rise to this change in conceptualisation are suggested in the wordclouds above, but whether these trends are global or specific to the UK remains a questions for future research.

Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2021-OLU-2250004)