Essay: Contacting habits of students who live abroad in the UK to study at the LSE

Introduction
When a student moves abroad to pursue their studies, a transnational family begins to exist. Sociological literature emphasises the issue of transnational families. This remarkable phenomenon is not new in itself, however, the way these families communicate has developed extremely over time. Due to the radical development of mediating technologies family members might enjoy the virtual presence at each other’s lives (Baldassar et al., 2014). My research project is devoted to understanding the contacting habits of students who live abroad in the UK to study at the London School of Economics. In the beginning of my project, I formed the research question in the following way: How do LSE students – who are detached from their families by borders – keep contact with their families?
This topic is a sociological area of interest as shedding light on how tech-mediated communication may help the maintenance of ‘familyhood’ (Bryceson and Vuorela, 2002) in this particular form of transnational situation when parents stay at the home country and children temporarily leave (Baldassar et al., 2014). Using a qualitative research method, I would like to find out how, when, and in what ways students keep in touch with their families, and how it helps to sustain ‘familyhood’. I am interested in whether there are some similarities and differences in the contacting habits of families, and what can account for these. Furthermore, I am keen to understand the emotional dimension that lies behind these contacting habits.
This essay intends to give a methodological reflection on the research process and introduce some preliminary topics of interest that emerged from data coding. First, I argue that interviewing is the appropriate method for answering the research question. Second, I justify why sampling for range was an efficient way to choose the research participants. Next, I explain how my insider situation supported the recruitment process, and I briefly introduce my interviewees. Afterwards, I walk the reader through how I constructed the interview guide and reflect on how the interviews went, at which point, I also describe how I improved the quality of my interview questions and interviewing skills throughout the process. Then, I present the upcoming ethical issues in the research. Then I proceed to argue that open-coding permitted me to identify some features of family contacting habits. Finally, I identify some points that are beginning to take shape around generational differences, emotional support and encouragement, situational impacts, the pressure to conform within the family and emotional effects of using video function, as the preliminary findings of the research.
Methodological reflection
I started designing my study with the help of Mason’s (2002) five questions, which supported the clarification of the research’s goals. Firstly, I situated my ontological and epistemological perspectives. While conducting this research, I, as a researcher, imagine the social world as a world of social interactions, in more concrete terms, as a world of communications. I picture my participants as “meaning-generating actors” and not objects. Hence, my epistemological view is that knowledge is situated (Haraway, 1988, p. 592).
Considering the choice of the appropriate research method fitting my research question, I have taken into account several aspects, starting with my ontological view. I envisage the world as social interactions. Interviews are not only capable of capturing social interactions but also uncovering angles of reality that ethnography hardly is because interviewers can reveal facts about or responses on social interactions (Lamont & Swidler, 2014). Besides that, I wanted to uncover similarities and differences in the family contacting habits, for which interviews are more suitable. Lamont and Swidler (2014) argue that interviews permit comparison across people and certain contexts. Moreover, unveiling the emotional dimensions lying behind contacts was also my aim. Therefore, interviewing the students proved to be more suitable to my research because interviewing has the ability to highlight ‘emotional dimensions’ of social experience, which would normally be very hard to infer from behaviour (Lamont and Swidler, 2014).
Although I argue that the interviews are best suited to my research, I acknowledged that ethnography could also be an appropriate method to use. According to Jerolmack and Khan (2014), ethnography has the ability to best explain social actions, as they are observed in their everyday contexts, which is their natural setting. However, a practical issue, namely language barrier, vastly influenced the method choice. Observing family communications without understanding them would not make sense and excluding non-English speaking families would massively limit the scope of my research.
Regarding the sampling procedure, I applied the sampling for range technique because it guarantees the involvement of a certain number of people from identified subcategories of the studied group (Small, 2009). It was really important to have students from different countries of origin in the sample because I believed that different cultural backgrounds might account for some patterns in family communicating habits. Gender also played an important role in sampling because gender differences could also be the root of dissimilarities in contacting habits. Therefore, I wanted to have both male and female participants. Although sampling for the range was the most efficient for the goals of the research, my sample suffered from problems of representativeness and bias (Small, 2009). Moreover, all the students I interviewed were postgraduates, which potentially leads to sample bias, creating a limitation of the research.
My position as an insider in the researched topic enabled me to easily access participants. I used my social networks to recruit potential interviewees. I asked university peers, either online or personally, whether they would like to take part in my research. Haraway (1988) argues that no objective knowledge production exists, therefore to decrease subjectivity paid specific attention not to involve close friends in the study. I was afraid that my background information about the interviewees and their families would influence the interview – by asking or not asking about particular issues – and the research outcome. Accordingly, the ideal participants were those, whose families I have never heard about previously. When contacting the potential interviewees, I briefly introduced the project and made candidates feel comfortable about not participating if they would not like to for any reasons. Luckily, all the four peers I contacted were happy to take part in the research.
With regards to some socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents, I interviewed two males and two females from very different parts of the world: The United States, Germany, China and Italy. Their parents still live in the country of their origin. All of them are from traditional families, one of them is an only child, while the other three interviewees have one sibling each. They all have been living in London since late summer/early autumn 2018, and all of them are studying at the postgraduate level.
Luker’s (2008) suggestions on constructing interview guides, to which I am referring through this paragraph, immensely helped my work. Firstly, I phrased questions in a simple way that could be easily understood. Further pursuing naturality, I avoided the use of jargon as much as possible. For instance, instead of using the expression nuclear family I asked about those family members whom they grew up with. Developing the guide, I started with the outlining of the main topics which would come up during the interview, i.e. general introduction, family relationships and family contacting habits. Logical ordering of these topics in the interview was crucial because it established a natural flow of conversation. After starting with basic questions, like How did you get to LSE? I went into more specific ones about family. Finally, I asked them more concretely about the central topic, family communication habits, such as how often do you contact them? or do you have a preferred channel? To link the topics mentioned above, I applied so-called ‘turn signals’, for example, “Now I would like to talk about how you contact your family when you’re here in the UK.”. The reason to use these signals was to steer the interview in the right direction and guide participants. At the end of the interviews, I asked ‘cooling down’ questions that focus on the near future, on upcoming holidays or starting term, because they allow the interviewee to return to the real world.
Having recruited the interviewees and developed the guide, I started conducting the interviews in December 2018 in the study rooms at the LSE Library due to its easy accessibility and quietness. Reflecting on the first interview, I could have let the content drive the process a bit more as opposed to forcing the structure on the interview said by my questions. The learning from the first interview made the second one more relaxed and organised at the same time.
However, I transcribed the interviews only a week later and not at the earliest opportunity. Luker (2008) argues the necessity of immediate transcription because reading written transcripts work differently for the mind than just listening back the records, and early transcription leaves a higher chance of capturing key takeaways. With hindsight, I would transcribe the interviews immediately because, while transcribing the first two interviews, I grasped that there were many spaces to improve both my question and my interviewing style.
Reflecting on my interviewing style in the first interviews, my interactions could have been more colourful. For example, I replied with an “Okay” or “Good” to many of the responses. Occasionally I also interrupted the interviewees with those reassuring reactions, whereas I should have listened silently. Likewise, due to my insider position in the researched topic, I talked more about my own experience than I should have. This behaviour goes against what Weiss (1994) claims about self-introduction of the researcher, according to which it should be decreased as much it is consistent with the interview. Additionally, I wanted to control the interview too much with continuously asking questions, thus not giving time to the interviewee to elaborate more on some topics. This could be considered to be an improper way to conduct an interview since an interview is regarded to be a collaboration of the interviewer and interviewee (Weiss, 1994). The transcription also shed light on which questions worked and which were not that successful. These insights benefit that the researcher gains from the first few interviews (Luker, 2008). For example, it turned out that questions regarding family contacting habits proved to be too general.
To address the weaknesses of the first interviews, I worked on the improvement of both questions and interviewing style. To tackle the dilemma of too general questions and the resulting obscure answers on the central topic, I followed Weiss’s (1994) guidance on how to obtain more detailed responses. In the topic of family contacting habits, I focused more on asking for the explanation of specific incidents, like “Could you walk me through the last time you contacted your family, just what happened?” rather than asking for generalised descriptions, which work better for the topics which are not in the centre of the study, such as introduction or ‘cooling down’ questions (Weiss, 1994). I was also interested in revealing the emotional dimension of communication. Weiss’s (1994) points on helping the interviewees develop information on internal events contributed to my success in this mission. Asking about the feelings in certain situations, like “And how do you feel when you video chat them?” allowed me to gain entry to this dimension. Thus, applying these ideas not only strengthened the quality of the responses but also developed my interviewing style. Furthermore, during my third and fourth interviews, I paid particular attention to wait for full responses and to avoid self-reporting as much as possible. While preparing for these interviews, I memorized the most relevant questions. This strategy enabled me to concentrate more on the interviewee during the interview and be more flexible on the questions.
Even though the development of the second-round interviews is notable, I acknowledged further skills to improve as a researcher. To help capture the emerging themes earlier, next time I should write down my impression right after the interview – what surprised me, what made me worried or upset, what were the circumstances. Luker (2008) argues that this technique considerably shapes the research and facilitates the analytical procedure.
Reflecting on a remarkable issue concerning insider knowledge, I should also consider some elements of research design more carefully in future research. A participant of the research was involved in qualitative research and informed me after the interview that they could acknowledge the interview structure. Thus, this interviewee gave rather short answers to the warming-up questions. Although this time it did not have any significant impact on the interview neither structure nor content-wise, in future research I should pay attention to the background of participants in qualitative research and not just to my insider situation in the researched topic.
Following the research ethics protocol, I shared an information sheet (see Appendix I.) about the project and asked for written consent of the participants prior to the interviews. During the course of the research, I faced an appearing ethical dilemma. In one interview I asked the participant to walk me through the last time they contacted their parents. They rejected it because they found the discussed topic too sensitive to share: “The last time, maybe it’s too personal to share with you, but, I mean, I can recall another one”. I acknowledged it was my ethical competence to deal with this kind of ‘conflict’ (Edwards and Mauthner, 2002). I believe my decision should serve the best interest of the interviewee because I highlighted in the information sheet that participants can withdraw – including withdrawing from answering particular questions – anytime with no consequences. Inckle (2015) argues that one of the essential elements of ethical research is being clear and consistent about the right of the participants, therefore, I supported the interviewee to changing describe a different occasion.
Preparing the raw transcribed interview for analysis, I coded the two interviews which I found the most remarkable content-wise. In the coding procedure I followed Coffey’s (1996) recommendation on starting the coding from the prefigured research question. I inductively generated my codes, which derived from the content of the interviews. To further organise my data, I grouped the commonly used codes into categories, also in a ‘bottom-up’ way, where I created the categories from the content of data. My aim was to identify the underlying forces of contacting habits, and open coding and categorization are regarded to be beneficial in helping the researcher find the points of interest (Strauss, 1987).
Preliminary findings
As a result of coding the two interviews, multiple points of interest have emerged. Firstly, it seems like the situational impact might generate similarities in the contacting habits of LSE students. Because of the unfamiliar and temporary nature of life situation, they gave an account of continually sharing information with their families. This raises the questions of what information they share with each other. Is there anything they, both students and families hide? If so, why? Generational effects in communication appeared to be an interesting point because as a result of continuous online availability communication with siblings looked to be different than with parents. This issue raises the question of whether there is a generation gap in communication. If yes, how does it affect parent-child communication? Furthermore, based on my coding process, the emotional support and encouragement provided by parents can regularly appear as a theme of communication, thus it might play a significant role in family maintenance. Thought-provoking questions regarding this issue can be: What counts as emotional support in a transnational setting? How is emotional closeness embodied via mediating technologies? Additionally, the emotional effects of video function in family communication occurred to be a noteworthy topic. Emotional overwhelm may result in the avoidance of some uses of new technologies, but then do emotional technologies always facilitate our life and communication? Finally, a particularly interesting issue – the pressure to conform within the family was portrayed. Fear of disappointing the parents might result in favouring them, for instance contacting them via video calls, even if students do not like it. It raises the question of whether families want to sustain the appearance of a perfect family within the family? If yes, why is this so important?
In further research, I would concentrate more on the transfer of emotional support and intimacy through tech-mediated communication because preliminary thematic analysis demonstrated its importance in maintaining families across borders.
Conclusion
In this report, I introduced a methodological reflection and preliminary analysis of my research project conducted on how students, who moved to the UK to study at LSE, keep contact with their families and how these contacting habits help sustain ‘familyhood’. I argued that the following methodological points of my research were appropriate: application of interviewing and sampling for range, the help of insider position in the recruitment process, and using an open-coding in data organization. In addition, I showed how I constructed the interview guide, and how the interviews went – what were the strength and limitations, and how I improve them. Based on preliminary analysis I highlighted some emerging topics, including generational differences, situational impacts, emotional support and encouragement that can be areas of interest in further research.
Using a qualitative research method for answering the research question is suitable because it allows me to understand the underlying forces of similarities and differences of family contacting habits, like situational and generational effects. Moreover, it enables me to unveil the emotional dimension of family contacts and to see how family communication, as a transmitter of emotional support and encouragement, helps to maintain ‘familyhood’.
I believe in future research it would be particularly interesting to study the above transnational family communication from the aspect of the parents who stay at the country of origin because they perceive the very same situation from an entirely different angle than students.