Microblogging and Life Changes: An Ethnographic and Statistical Analysis of Young Adults

Microblogging has revolutionized people's interaction on the web. This paper investigates the changes in the microblogging practices of young adults after they have experienced life changing events associated with studying and working overseas. To test for the presence of significant changes in microblogging behaviour the empirical analysis focusses on young Chinese adults who have moved to Australia to study and/or work. The data consists of a three-tier approach, with the first tier being based on questionnaires; the second tier consists of formal in-depth interviews; while the third tier involves an ethnographic analysis of online and offline participant behaviour as well as information collected from two focus groups. The behavioural changes of the participants are analysed using a range of statistical models which take into account microblogging practices relating to social media platform choices, behavioural strategies and frequency. Formally this involves using panel ordered probit models to identify potential significant changes in social media practices. In specifying the empirical models, key demographic attributes characterizing the participants are also incorporated into the analysis, including gender, age, location, duration, education, enrolment status and work status. The empirical results reveal evidence of significant changes in key social media practices of Chinese young adults in moving from China to Australia. Keywords: social media, study overseas, work overseas, three-tier approach. Official conference proceedings published by IAFOR are available at: http://iafor.org/issn-2186-5906-the-asian-conference-on-media-mass-communication-2014-official-conference-proceedings