دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی درک رسانه های اجتماعی و کار هویت در انتقال جوانان به دانشگاه - الزویر 2017

abstract

Social media (SM) are a core component of young people's lives and have been researched in relation to relationship building and maintenance. While SM are known to be useful in supporting life transitions for young people, we know little about the specific use patterns or activities associated with social adjustment during the specific transition to university. We explore the use of social media during the student transition to university in relation to theories of social comparison and community building and describe a three stage process which accounts for this transition. Participants move through the stages of affirmation, assimilation and integration similar to other life transitions, but in doing so, we reveal the importance of the intersection between offline and online activities and highlight the benefits and limitations of SM use in this transitional period.

Final discussion and conclusions

We began our study with a focus on two ways in which SM may have a strong role to play for students making the transition to university. Firstly, we talked of the kinds of identity work at play in SM and the comparison processes that can undermine or support an individual who is judging their place in the new social order. Secondly, we talked about the role of technology in community building and reflected on the ways that students are encouraged to develop and share a SM presence in the weeks prior to coming to university and in the period thereafter. Our study also set out to explore the demands of balancing online and offline communities, and the management of ‘context collapse’ on SM for new university students. In pulling together the thematic analysis we were struck by the importance of different stages in the transition to a new community and described in some detail the way SM was used to support three different stages of affirmation, assimilation, and integration. These phases have been identified as prevalent when people cross borders or cultures, as in the example of expatriates living abroad (Mao & Shen, 2015), and we can see similarities between themes in the literature on people coping with acculturation- the maintenance of connections to the past, as well as assimilation with new environments (see Lingel et al., 2014; Zhang, Jiang, & Carroll, 2012). In the following section, we will say a little more about how identity work and community building plays out across the three stages of affirmation, assimilation, and integration.