Impact of mobile phone on the acculturation of South Asian migrant workers in Singapore

The study examines how migrants’ communication over mobile phone as well as their appropriation of the technology affects their acculturation in host society. A pluralistic-typological approach towards acculturation helps understand the phenomenon as assimilation, integration, marginalization and separation. Previous research has shown that integration leads to migrants’ optimal adaptation to the host society. This study investigated the effects of mobile phone calling and of acculturation on the adaptation of low-skilled migrant workers in the host country’s social and work domains. The study followed a mixed methods approach and drew on data from survey questionnaire and in-depth interviews with 462 male migrant workers from South Asia in Singapore. Scales representing the quadri-modal model failed in construct validity, suggesting that the model was not applicable for the population under study. Instead, scales of cultural identity and multiculturalism in workplace were used to represent acculturation. Cultural identity, multiculturalism, and mobile calling to host cultures had positive effect on migrants’ organizational commitment, whereas multiculturalism in workplace positively affected migrants’ social adaptation. Analyses of qualitative data yielded four mobile phone user types – convenience seeker, experimenter, group communicator and austere user – and three acculturation types: culture connoisseur, culture campaigner and culturally petrified. Analysis also revealed the links between user types and acculturation types and produced the hyphenated categories: convenience seeker/experimenter- culture connoisseur, group communicator-culture campaigner and austere user-culturally petrified. The research advances scholarship in acculturation by incorporating migrants’ amount of mobile phone interaction with host and home cultures into the theoretical schema. The social constructivist position of technology’s meaning being constituted dynamically by social usages has been verified in an intercultural context.DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (WKWSCI