Tracking Transnationals Online

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SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

Transnational Community Profile

The transnational that emerges from this survey is young, educated, deeply dependent on media, and globally-oriented in outlook.

79% are under the age of 35.
55% are in an undergraduate or graduate university program.
94% use the Internet everyday.
30% want to live and work in a country other than their home country or the United States.

These virtually networked young professionals span the globe and range from long-term residents of the US to newly arrived.

Respondents identified 62 different home countries and 46 countries of citizenship.
56% have lived in the United States for at least 6 years.
44% have lived in the United States less than 5 years.

International communications technologies are vitally important to transnationals.

80% keep in touch with friends and family everyday or several times a week.
80% read news everyday or several times a week.
News sources are accessed more online than through traditional channels.

Differences emerged along gender, age, residency, and language origin and skill set. All of these are indicative of very different types of engagement with media, particularly in terms of online networks.

Men prefer entertainment activities and use more devices.
Women prefer communication activities and rely on branded social networks.

Younger transnationals use less media.
Older transnationals are more dependent on traditional media and don’t watch videos.

Newly arrived transnationals use more methods to stay in touch with friends and family and to get news about their home countries.

English language transnationals watch more TV and listen to more radio.
Non-English language transnationals replace some of their hobbies with English language learning activities.

Transnational Community Needs

The bottom line is that transnational communities are deeply dependent on media. Media makers and other organizations that serve transnational audiences need to focus on ways to create a richer, more valuable experience for them.

Media are intrinsic to transnational identity.

To maintain their ties to home countries, friends and family scattered around the world, and develop personal and professional goals, transnationals turn to media. When we talk about diasporic communities, often we are talking about media-based transnational communities, but we fail to recognize the significance of this. The information available about a home country through media not only shapes how a transnational views the region they have ties to but no longer reside in, but can become the heart of how a transnational defines their place in the world.

Essential news and information should be presented in many formats.

Online video is currently being hyped as the final frontier in web content, often suggested as a replacement for print particularly in advertising. But as this study shows, language divides shape media consumption, and presenting important news and information in print is essential to reaching specific populations who have a harder time with listening skills. Recent newcomers and language learners are more comfortable getting news and information in readable form as they become acclimated to new cultures. Before creating content, it is important to have a coordinated information presentation strategy that considers each audience and its needs, particularly if resources limit the information to one language.

Transnational communities want more connection.

Transnational communities have emotional attachments that need to be nurtured. They are hungry for stories that maintain personal connections to their home countries and remain invested in them through local ties and literal investments. Ethnic media outlets arose to serve this need, but many currently maintain a focus more on the communities being served within their local community. Cultivating partnerships with media organizations in the home country would be one way to deepen the richness of their content. Another specific recommendation for ethnic media is to reconsider their missions as content providers and consider themselves more in the light of community hubs. News articles already serve as places for conversation. Creating websites with rich community tools has tremendous potential to transform an ethnic media outlet from a place on the sidelines as observers to the virtual heart of a diaspora.

TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITY

Spanning the Globe

The 146 respondents included in the final results identify a total of 62 different home countries, with respondents ranging from having lived in the US for under a month to more than 20 years. There are 46 countries of citizenship represented, with nearly a third (31%) possessing dual citizenship. 86% of respondents have lived in two or more countries for at least one month each, 43% have lived in at least three, and nearly a third (30%) have lived in four or more countries for a minimum of one month each (fig. 3.1). The respondents in the survey have lived in a total of 259 different countries for at least one month.

A Cosmopolitan Outlook

I suspected that the recruiting methods discussed in the methodology, as well as the fact that the survey was fielded solely online, would reach a certain type of privileged transnational respondent, one who is more likely to identify with a cosmopolitan identity and corresponding values. A recently arrived or older immigrant would potentially be less exposed to the online recruitment outreach efforts, while a more virtually networked young professional would be more likely to see the announcement on a branded social network or message board. The final results bear out this hypothesis to a certain degree. The transnational community represented here can be seen as possessing some of the characteristics and attitudes of cosmopolitan transnationals; the majority are relatively young (fig. 3.2), educated (fig. 3.3), and well traveled (with travel including at least one Western country – the United States). Nearly a third would like to live and work in a country other than their home country or the United States (fig. 3.4). As to be expected in a group in which nearly 80% are between the ages of 18 and 34 (fig. 3.2), many are currently in school with 55% enrolled in a graduate or undergraduate program (fig. 3.3).

Respondents are not necessarily established long-term US residents. A majority, 56%, have lived in the United States for at least 6 years, while 44% are more recently arrived, with residency ranging anywhere from less than a month up to five years (fig. 3.5). The majority of respondents work full or part time (fig. 3.6). Respondents enjoy a wide variety of activities; the average respondent engages in over five hobbies. Religious affiliations are also wide-ranging, with considerable numbers of people who identify as atheist or do not identify with any organized religion or spiritual group.

When asked about their goals, respondents indicated a globally oriented outlook. While two-thirds expressed the desire to live and work in the United States, about a third also indicated wanting to live and work in a different country and a similar number want to return to their home country to live and work (fig. 3.4). Fully 29% of respondents chose more than one of these options or wrote in the goal of wanting to travel and live in more than one country.

Online and Engaged

With such a deeply engaged and active group of respondents, it is natural that their levels of media use would be similarly high. Of the seven types of media asked about in the survey, respondents reported using an average of three on a frequent basis. The Internet is nearly indispensable to this group, with 94% reporting that they use the Internet everyday (fig. 3.7). Television is also extremely valued, with nearly two-thirds watching TV everyday or several times a week, but 20% reports watching TV less than once a week or never (fig. 3.8). Reported use of newspapers, radio, and magazines diverges most heavily among respondents, with levels of use ranging widely from everyday to never (fig 3.8).

Keeping in touch with friends and family, reading news, and listening to music are significant priorities for these transnationals, trumping all other Internet activities ask about in the survey (fig. 3.9). Over three quarters frequently engage in each of these activities. Almost one in six report frequently watch videos, and one in five use the web for work. Fully one-quarter play games frequently.

International Communication Strategies

International communications technologies are vitally important to these transnationals for staying connected to their networks. When asked about methods of staying in touch with local and long-distance family, friends and professional contacts, respondents reported using a wide variety of methods but in targeted ways. Strategies for communicating with family varied widely based on location, suggesting that respondents contact their long-distance families through the cheapest method and local family through the most convenient method, usually mobile phone (fig. 3.10).

To contact friends, methods vary less, with mainly a shift from mobile to cheaper alternatives: Internet-based real-time channels like Skype, which offers instant message and video chat, and other instant message and video chat services (fig. 3.11). Branded social network use does not vary by location, suggesting that the majority of communication carried out through this channel is not time-sensitive. Video chat is being adopted to reach friends and family, but not professional contacts, which supports the idea that the added image offers an emotional dimension and immediacy to conversation that respondents find less necessary for professional communication (fig. 3.11 and 3.12). Both locally and across long distances, respondents show a stronger diversity of methods for staying in touch with friends than family, using an average of more than three forms of contact to stay in touch with friends, while only two for local family and three for long distance family.

Staying in touch with a home country can take many different forms, including reading news online, getting updates from friends and family back home, or accessing other forms of mass media including TV and radio. But the channel from which respondents are accessing mass media content shows large disparities. Respondents favor getting their news videos, radio broadcasts, and newspapers online as opposed to through traditional avenues (fig. 3.13). Thus, news sources trying to reach international communities should be focusing on increasing their availability online as much as possible.

THE GENDER DIVIDE

When examined through a gender comparison, media use overall is largely comparable, but certain areas hint at a divide. Because women in the sample skew older, complicating the picture with age, another very significant variable for predicting behavior and attitudes, I looked at two samples to develop the following analysis: men and women compared overall along with a subset of men and women aged 25 to 34.

An orientation towards entertainment for men and towards staying in touch for women is reinforced across answers to several different questions. Both women and men reported using a wide variety of media devices, but men were more likely to frequently use several entertainment-oriented media devices, including video game consoles, DVD players, and iPods or mp3 players (fig. 3.14). Several general activities displayed a gender disparity, with frequently reading news, watching videos and playing games all skewing male. Women were more likely to report frequently staying in touch with friends and family (fig. 3.15).

Activities for staying in touch emerges as a particular point of difference along gender lines. While similar numbers of women and men reported frequently engaging in most of the online communication activities listed in the survey, there were two notable exceptions. Social networking and Skype were used “everyday” or “several times a week” by larger numbers of women than men (fig. 3.16). When applied to staying in touch with friends, family, and professional contacts, these differences remained consistent, with both methods generally favored by women. In terms of staying in touch with these different audiences, women report stronger communications ties to friends and family, while men are more actively engaged with professional contacts (fig. 3.17). This reluctance among women to network on a professional level (even among younger women) is an issue that recently emerged as a hot spot discussion among academics studying online communities, and is certainly worth pursuing for further study (Shirky 2010).

One other area of staying in touch emerged as an arena worth further exploration along gender lines. When asked about staying in touch with their home country, women and men both reported talking to family as the most common method, with percentages hovering just above three quarters. But other methods asked about (mass media sources) were generally favored by men, suggesting that women may be receiving information about their home countries from fewer sources and using mass media sources in smaller numbers (fig. 3.18). However, this could be slightly misleading, in that fully a quarter of the sample of women aged 25-34 reports having been in the country for more than 20 years, while a similar number of men reports having been in the US for 10 to 20 years. This difference in length of residency could account for the lower engagement with staying in touch with a home country among women. Again, further study is warranted to confirm this trend and investigate its effects on country perceptions between the groups.

AGE AND ACTIVITIES

The age groups that emerged in this survey clustered into four brackets: 18 to 24 year olds (26%), 25 to 29 year olds (30%), 30 to 34 year olds (23%), and those over 35 (21%) (fig. 3.2). While the youngest and oldest naturally show the most variation, the other groups help us better understand some of the different stages transnationals go through.

When we look at how long these different age groups have been in the US, we can see a distinct life pattern emerge. While the average 18 to 24 year old is as likely to be a newcomer as an established resident of the US, 70 percent of 25 to 29 year olds are newcomers to the US, showing a trend to make the move across national boundaries in search of expanded opportunities as respondents become adults and are emancipated from their family households, most likely moving for educational and professional reasons (fig. 3.19). By their 30s, respondents have started to settle into long-term lives in the US, and those 35 and over are largely well-established in their lives in the US. Of course, this survey doesn’t look at transnationals who have returned to their home countries or moved on to other nations, so it impossible to speculate on how many of the younger respondents will leave the United States, and what percentage of older respondents are left from those who originally came at the same time.

Media habits vary dramatically by age, as has been confirmed by countless studies showing older users using fewer types of media and generally engaging in fewer activities. While this holds true for this sample of the transnational community as well, other interesting trends emerge. For example, the 18 to 24 year old group is less engaged with different types of media, often far lower than those 35 and over (fig. 3.20). While Internet use, telephone use, and book reading is comparable across the four age groups, large disparities are reported for the traditional mass mediums: television, radio, newspapers, and magazines (fig. 3.21). And while two thirds of 25 to 34 year olds and 8 in ten 35+ year olds watch television frequently, just 45% of 18 to 24 year olds do. The drop off is even more significant for the other mediums, with a quarter or less of 18 to 24 year olds consuming radio, newspapers or magazines. On the other hand, when compared to activities on the Internet, it’s clear that younger respondents are not consuming less video content than older respondents: about three quarters of 18 to 29 year olds are watching videos online frequently, while 61% of 30 to 34 year olds and just 16% of those over 35 do (fig. 3.22). Some of the drops can be explained by younger people’s more mobile lifestyles, which can lead to less time in front of screens, but the disparities seem notable and worth further investigation.

The fast changing landscape of media technologies and adoption is evident in the differences that emerge between 18 to 24 year olds and 25 to 29 year olds. 25 to 29 year olds emerge as the “power users” of the age groups, frequently engaging in more communications activities than any of the other age groups (fig. 3.20). In fact, 18% of 18 to 24 year olds report never using instant messenger services. Texting was not asked about in this survey, but it is easy to speculate that this is where the missing communication among this age group is going.

Staying in touch with a home country revealed a few final insights into how important media is across generations for maintaining national ties across the globe. Magazine consumption leans to an older audience, but almost one quarter of those over 25 read magazines from their home country on the Internet (just 8% of 18 to 24 year olds reported the same), quite a significant number and an important indicator to content producers of just how important local content is to citizens overseas who want to stay current with developments in their home countries. Similarly, 29% of 18 to 24 year olds and 26% of those over 35 report reading a newspaper in the language of their home country. It is difficult to speculate on why the number drops among 25 to 35 year olds, but again this would be a very interesting area to probe in future studies.

LENGTH OF RESIDENCY

While the age breakdown provides insights along generational lines, comparing newcomers to the US (those who have lived in the US for five years or less) and established residents (those who have lived in the US for six or more years) provides a set of patterns distinct from age that relate more to the strength of the bond to the home country and what that means for communications and news consumption activities. Recently arrived residents have stronger ties and more recent attachments to their home countries, as evidenced by their intense efforts to stay in touch with long-distant friends and family and get updates about their home countries. Newcomers use a wider variety of outreach efforts in both areas, using on average more methods to keep in touch with friends and family in the home countries (fig. 3.23) and outpacing established residents in almost every method of staying in touch with their home countries (fig. 3.24). The two notable exceptions here are the very traditional news consumption activities of watching television and listening to the radio (fig. 3.25). While newcomers watch videos and listen to audio broadcasts online in larger numbers than established residents, established residents use TVs and radio in greater numbers to consume news stories about their home countries. One reason may be language as discussed in the following section, which deals with the impact of language on media consumption.

LANGUAGE GAPS

Because this survey limited respondents to those currently living in the US, another lens that offers insight into which factors cause substantive differences within the community is that of language. While the survey did not ask about languages spoken, I did review home countries to find out how many respondents identified a home country where the official language spoken is English. Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States all emerged as English-language home countries identified by respondents in this survey. I compared the sample of 81 respondents who identify home countries where English is not the official language to the 71 respondents who identify English-language home countries to discover where they differed.

Respondents from non-English language home countries have on average spent less time in the United States. 54% have resided in the US for five years or less, while fully 31% of English language home country respondents have resided in the US for more than 20 years. Having on the whole weaker English language skills, one in ten non-English language home country respondents express a desire to learn English for professional or educational reasons (fig. 3.26). Long-term goals reveal differences within the two groups: about 30% of each group expressed a desire to live and work in countries outside of their home countries, but while 74% of English language home country respondents wish to live and work in the United States, only 60% of non-English language home country respondents hold the same goal (fig. 3.27). A similar skew characterizes the other side of the equation: over one-third of non-English language respondents express a desire to live and work in their home countries, while just 24% of English language respondents do (fig. 3.27).

Language-based disparities emerge in other ways as well, impacting which types of media the two groups use frequently. While modest numbers of non-English language respondents appear to use newspapers more than English language respondents, the reverse holds true for radio (fig. 3.28). This makes sense for a time-based medium like radio, which requires a strong skillset in spoken English, which is particularly challenging for more recent newcomers trying to get fully up to speed in a new language and culture. Newspapers offer a less challenging source of information in that there is no time limit on reading comprehension and unfamiliar words can be looked up in dictionaries. Getting news, information and updates about home countries thus poses a challenge, as evidenced by lower use overall of mass media sources for this purpose among non-English language respondents (fig. 3.29). In one exception, non-English language respondents are more likely than English language respondents to read magazine content from their home countries online. However, radio, TV and print sources demonstrate the reverse trend, regardless of whether they were accessed online or off (fig. 3.28). Educational activities also differ based on language. Activities including practicing English, using English education websites, and using translation websites are naturally favored by non-English language respondents, while learning about hobbies and interests is favored by English language respondents, suggesting that learning English is often done in spare time and displaces hobbies when necessary (fig. 3.30).

A greater importance on immediacy in communication may be another potential side-effect of language challenges. Non-English language respondents show an affinity for using real-time methods of communication when staying in touch with local and long-distance contacts. On average, a non-English language respondent will use more methods to reach local and long-distance family and friends, as well as long-distance contacts (fig. 3.31).

Methods favored by non-English language respondents in comparison to English language respondents for staying in touch with local friends and family include Skype and instant messenger services, both of which offer the ability to chat in real-time. As for long-distance communication methods, non-English language respondents again prefer real-time methods like Skype and video chat while English language respondents favor branded social networks.

DEVELOPING THE SURVEY

I started by trying to define a target population that I would be able to send the survey to in order to get a sample representative of a transnational community. But which transnational community? And how would it be defined? Transnationality as a concept is still too fluid to be corralled into a countable group, since the identity comes in the form of many different affiliations and attachments. Even in approaching the relatively simple task of defining a relationship with more than one country, how strong must the relationship be to become a transnational? One potential respondent emailed me to ask if he should take the survey, given that he was born in Russia, but moved to the United States as an infant. His only relationship to the “old country” was through occasionally catching the program “Russia Today” on a local television channel.

Identifying birth country, then, makes a poor proxy given the relatively weak relationships of many US citizens born in a different country. Dual citizenship proves equally weak, since many countries don’t allow dual citizenship and others provide it based on financial investment. For all of the reasons discussed here, I analyze the dataset in descriptive terms rather than as one representative of any one transnational community. To identify transnationality in this survey, I use self-reported affiliation with at least two countries, with one being the United States. In order to qualify to take the survey, respondents had to currently live in the United States and report at least one home country other than the US. In choosing to limit survey respondents to US residents, I hoped to minimize some of the problems of comparing media use across regions with differing levels of infrastructure and access among information and communication technologies (ICTs). Thus, despite drastically different linguistic, cultural and geographic backgrounds, all the respondents share the same current geographic backdrop of the United States with its oligopolistic telecom industry shaping media access throughout the country.

METHODOLOGY

The survey targeted transnationals aged 18 years of age or older who currently reside in the US but identify themselves as originating from a different country. In the interest of expediency, I chose to field the survey solely online. The survey was programmed in Survey Monkey and fielded over a two-week period in February and March 2010. The survey used a snowball sampling method, being distributed through an announcement on email and online social networks including Facebook and Twitter with a request to forward to other contacts, relying on personal networks to distribute the link to the survey to a sizeable population.

Additionally, an announcement was posted on a general message board with a sizeable membership (members live in many different countries but is primarily focused on popular culture and all conversation is conducted in English). Inquiries were also sent to several message boards that serve primarily immigrant and transnational populations, however, none responded or posted the survey announcement. Of the 189 respondents who completed the survey, 146 were qualified and are included in the reported findings. The 43 respondents who were excluded from the report either did not live in the United States or lived in the US and reported no home country other than the US. Respondents were recruited through three distinct outreach efforts: an email announcement, a general message board announcement, and short announcements posted to three branded social networks (Facebook, Twitter, and Google Buzz).

Over half were gathered through the email announcement to roughly 200 personal contacts. The text of the announcement included a request to forward to friends and family who were qualified. Through email responses I received to my request, I estimate that at a minimum another 100 people received the email announcement. Over a third were recruited through an announcement posted to a general message board with a large global audience. Popular topics on the board include humor, pop culture, and current events. The final 10% were recruited through link distribution on the branded social networks mentioned above.

Respondents were offered an incentive to complete the study in the form of a contest awarding four $25 gift certificates to Amazon.com to random winners. Participants were assigned a number, and four winning numbers were generated using RANDOM.ORG’s true random number generator built and operated by Mads Haahr of the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland.

All respondents were asked general demographic questions along with a series of questions to identify media habits and frequency. The results are presented in a series of charts, tables, and maps that present key characteristics of the sample and describe variations found within the sample that indicate possible trends in media use and adoption.

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