Exploring Parenting On WeChat: An Ethnography In Social Media

Author(s):

Xin Luo(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)

Format:

Paper

Session Information

ERG SES C 02, Social Media and Education

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-21

11:00-12:30

Room:

W3.11

Chair:

M. Allyson Macdonald

Contribution

Chinese parenting has experienced dramatic changes during the past decades. Parenting beliefs, practices and theories have undergone dramatic shifts due to the unprecedented socioeconomic changes that have taken place in Chinese society (Kuan, 2015). These changes have occurred within the context of an emerging market economy, increasing globalisation, westernisation as well as Socialism and Confucian traditions (Fong, 2004). As a result, parents’ ideas on what is ‘good’ parenting and education, and how ‘good’ parenting can contribute to ‘good’ education vary. During recent years, with increasing number of smartphone users and the rise of social media, parenting has frequently appeared as a popular topic in social media in China, where parents can openly criticise and confront the institution of official education.

This paper is part of a research project on Chinese parenting in early years’ education (EYE) context in social media. Rather than discuss parenting practice, the paper will focus on the methodological implication of the project. It intends to explore how social media can be used as a tool to gain insights into parenting and education research. The parents in the study are smartphone users situated in a popular Chinese social media app called WeChat. Designed for smartphone holders, WeChat is the premier social media app in China, which combines messaging, video and voice calling, posting, sharing, grouping and other typical social media functions. The parents in my study voluntarily joined a parental group in WeChat with a common interest of pursuing better EYE education, addressing concerns about official education system and sharing information, opinions and practice of EYE.

Social media, as the primary space where the informants live their life and where I collect data, is informants’ natural habitat (Parker Webster & Marques Da Silva, 2013). People create and communicate meanings there and can easily switch between the online and offline worlds, crossing the blurred border (James & Busher, 2013). The on-line space is built in people’s offline world while their life offline is reflected online. That is to say, the two worlds are not paralleled, but intertwined. In this study, informants’ online discussion are closely associated with their experience of education offline. Their opinions, attitudes and emotions towards education developed offline are also communicated and shared online. Moreover, people’s online activities in social media may lead to the change of their opinions, attitudes, emotions and even practices in the offline space, which are then brought back for further discussion online. The relationship between informants’ online and offline space operates as a loop, which offers a window to understand what parenting and education means in their life.

In this study, social media is the site, the basis of informants’ existence and the mode of communication that mediate the interaction of the community (Howard & Jones, 2004). It is a site in a sense that informants, from various walks of life, are located there and they live their life and interact with each other in that space. Traditionally, interaction in a research site is bounded by space and time. That is to say, informants’ activities take place within a limited time with a clearly marked boundary (Boyd, 2009). Social media that accommodates this study, however, revolutionises and forwards the notion of research site (Hine, 2000, 2008; Parker Webster & Marques Da Silva, 2013). Through social media, people are enabled to cross the temporal and space barriers of traditional sites (Kendall, 2009). Indeed, social media provides the material basis for the existence of informants online, just as the Earth does for them offline. As the paper explores the methodological implications, it will apply to European context as well.

Method

In order to explore Chinese parenting and the role of social media in the process of unfolding it, I employed ethnography as it allows me to get thick data, go deep and think wide (Bryman, 2001; Walford, 2008). It allowed me to creatively explore Chinese parenting in its rarely tapped territory, social media. And I was enabled to use all the available methods as long as they were effective, ethical and practical (Walford, 2008) . A parents’ group in WeChat that comprised around 500 members was selected as the primary site for my research. The group members were mainly parents whose children aged around four to eight. Besides, there were also a few members who were not parents, but teachers, private tutors, or like me, researchers. Despite the different backgrounds, all members shared a common interest in education and were ready to listen to parents’ concerns. As a member of the group, I immersed myself for an extended time. I ‘watched’ their monologue, conversation and sometimes argument. I read the posts they shared. And I tried to understand their concerns about education. All these information, with my field notes, was treated as my primary data. With the initial analysis of the data, I selected eight parents and conducted semi-structured interviews with them, using the voice call function built in WeChat. The interviews were transcribed and, together with WeChat group data, were analysed. Instead of calling it ‘virtual ethnography’ (Hine, 2000), ‘multi-sited ethnography’ (Hine, 2007) or ‘netnography’ (Kozinets, 2009) , I define this study as intra-sited ethnography as both the two research sites, WeChat group and voice call interview, are built in one platform. WeChat data provides a basis for the voice call interview; the voice call interview deepens my understanding of parents’ activities in WeChat. One research site cannot produce a complete picture of the community without the help of another. In this study, I redefined some key ideas of traditional ethnography and tried to accommodate them into the context of WeChat. For example, ‘being there’ in social media can be lurking, i.e. a member can be there ‘invisibly’ without intruding into other members’ life; participating in a social media group can be simply joining and following, without making any tangible contributions, as the number of group participants itself has already (re)produced meanings; and observation needs more ‘‘ethnographic imagination’ (Brewer, 2000) to connect people’s online activities with offline life.

Expected Outcomes

There are three main findings of the study. First, social media proves to be multi-functional in providing complete pictures of informants in educational ethnography. It advances the definition of research site and brings people together without time and space barriers. As a powerful tool in data collection process, social media allows the researchers to track informants’ activities histories that take place in different time slots in one window. People in WeChat sometimes even share their family holiday, daily leisure activities and career life to either get feedback from others or simply express themselves. Moreover, social media creates new social relationship, blurring the boundary between private and public life. The WeChat parent group is a strangers’ community; however, some people feel safer and more comfortable, probably due to the use of alias and long physical distance, to talk about their children’s education. These all enable the researchers have a thick description of informants’ life context. Like in offline world, people in WeChat will also build up webs of social relationships. Similar with offline worlds, people will have conflicts, disagreements and emotions to express. Social media like WeChat mediates people’s interaction and affords them the opportunity to express. For example, emoji in this study proved to be powerful in allowing the users to express their feelings, harmonise relationships, avoiding potential conflicts. Thirdly, in order to use participants’ online activities to build up the image of their life offline world, ethnographic imagination is necessary. Thus, an ‘ethnographic imagination framework’ is discussed and set up. It recognise the role of researchers in ethnography work and use researchers’ subjectivity as a tool to empower ethnographic data. The framework intends to transform the mainly textual ethnography data into multimodal data set. The findings can also contribute to ethnography research using social media in European context.

References

Boyd, D. (2009). A response to Christine Hine. In Annette N. Markham & N. K. Baym (Eds.), Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. Retrieved from http://sk.sagepub.com/books/internet-inquiry. doi:10.4135/9781483329086Brewer, J. D. (2000). Ethnography. Buckingham: Buckingham : Open University Press. Bryman, A. (2001). Introduction. In A. Bryman (Ed.), Ethnography. London: London : Sage. Fong, V. L. (2004). Only hope : coming of age under China's one-child policy. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press. Hine, C. (2000). Virtual ethnography. London: London : SAGE. Hine, C. (2007). Multi-Sited Ethnography as a Middle Range Methodology for Contemporary STS. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 32(6), 652-671. doi:10.1177/016224390303598 Hine, C. (2008). Virtual Ethnography: Modes, Varieties, Affordances. The SAGE Handbook of Online Research Methods. SAGE Publications, Ltd. London: SAGE Publications, Ltd. Howard, P. N., & Jones, S. (2004). Society Online: The Internet in Context: SAGE Publications. James, N., & Busher, H. (2013). Researching hybrid learning communities in the digital age through educational ethnography. Ethnography and Education, 8(2), 194-209. doi:10.1080/17457823.2013.792509 Kendall, L. (2009). A Response to Christine Hine. In Annette N. Markham & N. K. Baym (Eds.), Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method. Thousand OaksThousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. Retrieved from http://sk.sagepub.com/books/internet-inquiry. doi:10.4135/9781483329086 Kozinets, R. V. (2009). Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online: SAGE Publications. Kuan, T. (2015). Love's Uncertainty : The Politics and Ethics of Child Rearing in Contemporary China (1st ed.. ed.): Berkeley : University of California Press. Parker Webster, J., & Marques Da Silva, S. (2013). Doing educational ethnography in an online world: methodological challenges, choices and innovations. Ethnography and Education, 8(2), 123-130. doi:10.1080/17457823.2013.792508 Walford, G. (2008). The nature of educational ethnography. In G. Walford (Ed.), How to do educational ethnography. London: London : Tufnell Press.

Author Information

Xin Luo (presenting / submitting)

University of Edinburgh

Moray House School of Education

Edinburgh

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