HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Human Rights Quarterly 34 (2012) 986–1020 © 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Measuring National Human Rights: A Reflection on Korean Experiences Jeong-Woo Koo,* Suk-Ki Kong,** & Chinsung Chung*** ABSTRACT This article proposes a research strategy to construct national human rights indicators and indices and uses this strategy for the assessment of human rights observance in the Republic of Korea during the period 1990 to 2007. To ensure reliability, the proposed indicators are derived from the Conclud- * Jeong-Woo Koo (jkoo@skku.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University. He currently studies the impact of global human rights on different national domains, such as public opinion, media, government organizations, refugee policies, school curricula, and ODA polices. His recent publications have appeared in Social Forces, Sociology of Educa- tion, and Comparative Education Review. ** Suk-Ki Kong (skong@snu.ac.kr) is a Research Professor at the Seoul National University Asia Center. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. He studies social movements, NGOs, and political sociology. His co-authored volumes include Global NGOs: Beyond “Wild Card” in World Politics and Human Rights in East Asia: A Comparison of Korean and Japanese Human Rights Improvement. His publications have appeared in Citi- zenship Studies and Korean Journal of Sociology. *** Chinsung Chung (chungcs@snu.ac.kr) is a Professor of Sociology at Seoul National Uni- versity. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. She studies gender sociology, social history, and human rights and has written numerous books on social movements in Japan, Japanese military sexual slavery, and human rights situations in Korea and Japan. She is also a human rights activist as well as a Member of the United Nations Human Rights Council Advisory Committee. An earlier version of this article was presented at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in Atlanta in August 2010 and the International Conference on “Human Rights and the Social” held at Seoul National University in November 2009. We thank the editor, Bert B. Lockwood, anonymous reviewers of Human Rights Quarterly, John W. Meyer, Francisco O. Ramirez, John Boli, Judith Blau, Chris Borhani, Eui Hang Shin, and Keun-Sik Jung for their helpful comments. Research for this article was supported by grants from the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean government (NRF-2010-J01601) and by an internal university award (Faculty Research Fund) from Sung- kyunkwan University. Direct all correspondence to Jeong-Woo Koo, Department of Sociology, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul 110–745, Korea. Email: jkoo@skku.edu.