An exploration on the use of Facebook as a tool for social support during an intercultural exchange program more

Paper presented in Global Learn 2010, Penang, Malaysia An exploration on the use of Facebook as a tool for social support during an intercultural exchange program Jason Wen Yau LEE Beaumie KIM, Misong KIM Learning Sciences Lab, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore jasonleewy@gmail.com Abstract: The use of social networking technology has become increasingly pervasive and embedded into the daily lives especially in the younger generation. This study is to explore the usage of a social networking site called Facebook by participants on a high school intercultural exchange program. Social networking software is not traditionally thought to be an environment where learning would occur but is changing as researchers begin to look into this area of inquiry. While we are still at the early phases of the study, we intend to investigate how interaction with peers and other exchange students creates an environment that enables them to receive support and share ideas in a fluid and unrestrictive manner. Introduction Participants on an exchange program often develop a sense of loneliness in their new environment as they are removed from familiar surroundings (Stone Feinstein & Ward, 1990). The use of communication technology over the Internet has removed the barrier distance and enabled communication between participants, family, and friends. However, it has been common belief among intercultural trainers that the frequent use of online communication technology such as instant messaging and emails disrupts the adjustment process of intercultural adaptation. This is because the student will be in constant communication with family and friends back home thus not attempting to adjust to their new environment. While this may be valid reason to this commonly held belief, there has been little studies to prove or disproof the claim of adjustment with communication with family back home. However, what is known is that the psychological well-being of a person during an intercultural exchange correlates with the social support a person receive during their time abroad (Dyal, 1984; Ward, 2004; Ward, Bochner, & Furnham, 2001). Intercultural trainers have acknowledged that participants on an exchange program requires continuous support during their time abroad but there are insufficient resources to fully support all the participants who are likely to face some form of mini crisis during their time abroad. In most cases, such mini crisis does not require urgent attention but can affect the adjustment process of the exchange. It seems paradoxical that the best people to support participants on the intercultural exchange program are the participants themselves as they are going or have gone through similar emotional process as their peers and can therefore better relate and empathize to the problems. With the increase and pervasive of use of social networking technologies, this study aims to investigate how social networking technologies such as Facebook is creating alternative avenues of support among participants on an intercultural exchange program. Social networking during an intercultural exchange A social network can be defined as a network of people (friends, families and acquaintances) with whom one shares a social relationship. With the advancement in communication technologies, social networking now has gone online and the term social networking websites is now synonymous with websites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Friendster. Such websites requires users to register and create a profile which also include demographical information, interest, and photos of themselves. What differentiates social networking websites with personal webpage is that users are able to add “friends” to their profile page thus creating a virtual social network. As members of this social network, friends are able to exchange messages, share photos and other information that may otherwise be inaccessible to people who are not within their social network. One of the most popular social networking website is called Facebook which has over 350 million active users (Facebook, 2009). Among the features of Facebook that enables various levels of interaction between users such “wall post” that enables a user to write to other user’s virtual walls, “notes” which is similar to a weblog post, Paper presented in Global Learn 2010, Penang, Malaysia sharing of photo albums and the popularly used “status update” which is a way for users to expresses one’s feelings, mood or action. What makes the site interactive is that users are able to comment on each other’s posts and respond to them asynchronously with a record of details meticulously kept on the user’s profile page. Therefore, it will not surprising that the use of social networking websites is popular among participants on an intercultural exchange program. In an exchange program, participants will live abroad in an environment that is foreign to them for a period of time. During this time, research indicates that receiving support from their social network is essential to the adjustment process (Church, 1982; Gudykunst, 1998; Lysgaard, 1955). Adjustment to a foreign culture is a process that involves going through a continuous process of adaptation and adjustment. Friends, families and other participants on the program are usually the people that an exchange student will seek support from in times when facing adjustment difficulty. This is in addition to the support that exchange students receive from the organization that organizes the exchange. With the pervasive use of social networking websites, numerous researchers have investigated this social phenomenon (e.g., Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007; Mazer, Murphy, & Simonds, 2007; Nielson, 2009) but no attempt has been made into the investigation of using social networking as a social support tool during time abroad on an intercultural exchange program. It should be noted that social networking websites were designed primarily as tools to connect with friends but not as social support tools. However, the open design social networking sites create the possibility of using such sites beyond the original intention as a tool to connect with friends. Therefore, in this study, we will investigate the use of social networking technologies of participants on a high school intercultural exchange program. The Participants The participants of this study consist of 40 students who were on a 6-month high school exchange program from Malaysia to the United States. They were aged between 17-18 years old and have proficiency in both English and Malay. They lived with an American host family during this time and attended public high school throughout the entire stay. While the participants came from various states across the country, they had a chance to become acquainted in a 3-day orientation camp prior to departure to the United States. We chose to investigate the use of Facebook as most participants for this study have an account or are active users of this social networking website. We did not instruct the participants to create a Facebook account but we noticed that some of the participants created an account on their own accord while on the program. Over the period of 6 months abroad, we periodically monitored postings by the participants to have a sense of the use of Facebook. Due to the high volume of data generated, we decided to focus data to the status updates and responses that participants posted on their profile page as it serves as a surrogate to express their emotional and cognitive processes. In addition to that, we conducted interviews to allow for better understanding about the experiences during their time abroad and also more specifically to understand how they perceive the use of Facebook. We conducted these interviews with the participants prior to their departure abroad on exchange and immediately upon returning back to their home country. Analysis Framework In order to understand how social networking websites are used as a social support tool, we intend to analyze the status update postings made by the participants while on the program. We adopted a social support framework proposed by Wills (1987) that consist of four categories which are: (a) esteem support, (b) informational support, (c) instrumental support, and (d) social companionship. Table 1 is an illustration of social support categories and some examples that we found in the initial analysis that fits within this framework. Category and description Esteem support Support that helps others to be more emotionally stable by motivating them through words of support, encouragement, or concern. By Status Update / Comments Examples Siti :arini **** mngamuk bgai owg gila..lps tu baling cwn kt dindng..menakutkan..mcm tnggl ngn owg gila jer..sume owg jd gile r..smua gila!! rmh nie mmg mcm rmh owg sakit jiwa.. [today, *** gone crazy like a mad Paper presented in Global Learn 2010, Penang, Malaysia receiving such support, a person self-esteem will be raised as they have affirmation that there are people who are concerned about them and that they are not alone when dealing with problems. person... and threw cups to the wall... scary ... it’s like living with crazy people... everyone is crazy, all are crazy!! This home is really like a mental institution] Sam: hey...r u ok???wat happen??any prob der?? [Hey, are you ok? What happened? Any problems there?] Siti: Sam mmg truk r..dasyat dow..nk explain to u pn xtau mcm mn nk explain..im speechless [Sam, it was bad. Really bad. I don’t even know how to explain. I’m speechless] Tim: is planning to sit for the SATs. Any advice? Danny: If you screw up the first time, like most of us do, you can always take it again, the colleges only takes the highest score into account… but you should be fine =P Tim: is planning to sit for the SATs. Any advice? Sean: bro, u dun nid to do all tht crappy test la.. bt if u simply do it..go ahead and try… [bro, I do not think you need to bother with all those test but if you need to, go ahead and try…] Tim: 16 more hours :) That's all i have to wait. NYC :) Sarah: omg. Envy Matt: OMG! ur going NYC! have fun there! take loads of pretty pictures. Informational support Support that helps others through practical or specialist knowledge. A person with a large social network is therefore likely to have more friends who have answers to questions they have. Instrumental support Support that helps others through suggestion of practical action. Social Companionship Support that helps boost collegiality by chatting or maintance of friendship through casual communication Table 1: Categories of social support and related status updates and response Discussion At the time of writing, we are in the initial phase of analyzing the data collected. In this section, we will discuss several observations that warrant further investigation for the later part of this study. Facebook is built to be a social website thus has an informal setting. As such, the language and style of writing for postings and comments are informal and at times colloquial. Being an informal environment, there is no structure in the postings which makes developing a framework for analysis a challenging process. There are instances where postings are very subjective in nature due to the colloquial language and online jargon used that can have various meanings. As such subjectivity are common in qualitative research, it is therefore important for the researcher to understand the context of the postings to make a proper judgment in categorizing and interpreting the data. Overall, we found that the participants used the Status Update function in Facebook for various reasons such to update or even brag to other friends about experiences, to rant about their frustrations, and as a social support tool. The design of Facebook that is built on a social networking framework enables groups of people who share a commonality to be connected together in a seamless manner. When one updates his or her status in Facebook, it gets “pushed” to all friends as “news feeds”. Friends who find the status update interesting can comment on them and is viewable to all other friends of the user. We observed that such comments come in the form of social support when the participant’s friends feel that they need some social support. This is especially true as we observed the participants of this study form an informal community of practice where they actively supported each other through the commenting and posting on each other’s wall and status updates (Refer to Table 1). As all the participants are at least bilingual, certain postings especially those related to the emotional support category were occasionally written in a mixture of both Malay and English. Such use of Malay was especially prevalent in sensitive discussion that relates to participant’s relationship in the United States. Occasionally, Malay was used to discuss exclusively to friends back home or with other Malaysian participants on the exchange program that is considered to be in the participant’s in-group. This was corroborated with an interview with a participant who said she used Malay so that “others [non-Malaysian] could not understand me” Paper presented in Global Learn 2010, Penang, Malaysia The usage of Facebook was not uniform across all participants. Each participant used Facebook differently while some were not very active users of Facebook or were more active in other social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster. Our initial finding reveals that Facebook is just one of the means that participants turn to for social support as it provides an easy, fast and convenient way to reach out to large number of audience. The participants still preferred to speak directly to their counselor or support person when having any difficulties. However, we observed that the Facebook was useful to help resolve minor issues that were not critical but may otherwise affect the adjustment process of the participant during their time abroad. Further investigation will have to be conducted to understand if the use of social networking websites assisted with the adjustment process during the participant’s time abroad. Significance In the education arena, there is a shift in the views on the purpose of education with a growing emphasis on not just acquiring knowledge but developing skills and resources that are critical in engaging in social and technological changes (Owen, Grant, Sayers, & Facer, 2006). The advancements in technology are now beginning to see a growth in technologies that are more community based rather than being individual focused. Within the field of intercultural training where the methods have remained largely unchanged over the past 20 years, there is a growing interest among researchers in adopting new methods from the field of education technology that will help in the development of intercultural competence (Bennett, 2009). Based on findings from this study, one of the innovations we hope to achieve is to explore if the processes in intercultural learning occur within a social networking website. Social software are not thought to traditionally be an environment where learning would occur but is changing as researchers are beginning to look into this area of inquiry (e.g., McLoughlin & Lee, 2007). Learning in such socio-cultural system where the participants interact with their peers and other learners creates an environment that enables them to connect, receive support and share ideas in a fluid and unrestrictive manner. While the use of online communication technology may seem to inhibit intercultural development as participants may frequently communicate with their family and friends back home, this study aims to uncover how the usage of two online environments affects the intercultural development process. 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