Vietnamese Family Values: Similarities and Differences between Two Large Cities in the North and the South-Ha Noi and Can Tho

This paper analyses similarities and differences on family values between two large cities which are representative for two cultural areas of Vietnam: 1) Ha Noi, a capital city of Vietnam, that characterizes for the Red River Delta culture in the North of Vietnam and has many culture characteristics that are close to East Asian culture; and 2) Can Tho, a major city of South West of Vietnam, that characterizes for the Mekong Delta culture and has many culture characteristics that are close to Southeast Asian culture. Data are drawn from Ha Noi Family Survey in 2010-2011 with 1,219 respondents and Can Tho Family Survey in 2017 with 1,205 respondents. Both surveys are funded by the Kyoto University (Japan) and used the same questions about family values and practices as in Comparative Asian Family Survey (CAFS) and East Asian Social Survey (EASS), so their analysis results could be compared among Asian societies. Major issues analyzed in the paper are: attitude to marriage, attitude to divorce, attitude to living together with parents after marriage or separately, making decision in the family, and attitude to child value. These characteristics will be analyzed for several independent variables such as education, age, marriage status, urban/rural. As can be hypothesized, data analysis show that, even though Ha Noi and Can Tho residents live very far from each other, they still share many major family values on marriage and parents-children relationship, that expresses a traditional culture reservation at a certain level of Viet people in the process of migration to the South in the last few hundred years. At the same time, as a result of culture integration, family values of Can Tho people has fallen in line with Southeast Asian values in some respects that has made the development of Vietnamese family diversified.