Rock, Rap, or Reggaeton?: Assessing Mexican Immigrants' Cultural Assimilation Using Facebook Data

The degree to which Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are assimilating culturally has been widely debated. To examine this question, we focus on musical taste, a key symbolic resource that signals the social positions of individuals. We adapt an assimilation metric from earlier work to analyze self-reported musical interests among immigrants in Facebook. We use the relative levels of interest in musical genres, where a similarity to the host population in musical preferences is treated as evidence of cultural assimilation. Contrary to skeptics of Mexican assimilation, we find significant cultural convergence even among first-generation immigrants, which problematizes their use as assimilative "benchmarks" in the literature. Further, 2nd generation Mexican Americans show high cultural convergence vis-\`a-vis both Anglos and African-Americans, with the exception of those who speak Spanish. Rather than conforming to a single assimilation path, our findings reveal how Mexican immigrants defy simple unilinear theoretical expectations and illuminate their uniquely heterogeneous character.Comment: WebConf 201

Research of migration processes in electronic social networks

The article сarries out an analysis of the practices of using electronic social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Vkontakte, etc.) in the study of migration processes. The paper shows how alternative to traditional sources (administrative, surveys) data allow us to form an up-to-date idea of the spatial-temporal and socio-demographic characteristics of migration. The authors study the integration of migrants in destination countries, including difficulties of assimilation and identity preservation, geography of migration flows, migration due to natural disasters and political reasons, intellectual and labour migration. The specificity of the data generated by social networks is that they cover the entire population and are produced in real time.The paper highlights the search for the necessary information using the means of platforms – advertising plugins, geolocation in posts and information directly collected from users, the functioning of certain communities, published comments. The study also gives important methodological features, the success of the results of any research conducted through the analysis of electronic social networks depends on the consideration of which. The problem of the information obtained with their help lies in such limitations as accessibility (technical features of specific platforms), representativeness (insufficient development of statistical techniques for evaluation) and variability of user preferences. In conclusion, the authors conclude about the prospects of using digital mass communication media in the study of migration processes.The scientific and practical significance of the research paper lies in the fact that it complements the literature on the topic under consideration, being the first systematic review of it in the Russian language, and also provides recommendations on the use of the information obtained

Raves and close shaves: an auto/biographical foray into the life of a young black 90s rave queen

In this article, I reflect on my experiences in 1990s Rave culture as a young Black woman. This article incorporates Wright-Mills’ (1959) ‘Sociological Imagination’ to explore how the socio-historical events of the time shaped my involvement in the rave scene. Further, it explores how raving served as a form of intergenerational resistance against familial and community expectations. I was often a minority in certain rave scenes, considered predominantly White spaces. At the same time, I was regarded as a ‘misfit’ among my Black peers for ‘transgressing’ what they perceived as norms of Blackness, such as engaging in popular culture and music genres like Hip Hop and R’n’B. Through my experience, I consider debates concerning relationships between popular culture consumption and the construction of our ethnic and racial identities. Specifically, I explore how these elements are used to determine our ‘authenticity’ and identities as Black people. I also suggest that our experiences reflect the importance of recognising and celebrating the differences within and between Black people, including our life choices, such as music preferences

Close Social Networks Among Older Adults:The Online and Offline Perspectives

Qualitative studies have found that the use of Information and Communication Technologies is related to an enhanced quality of life for older adults, as these technologies might act as a medium to access social capital regardless of geographical distance. In order to quantitatively study the association between older people’s characteristics and the likelihood of having a network of close friends offline and online, we use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and data from Facebook. Using a novel approach to analyze aggregated and anonymous Facebook data within a regression framework, we show that the associations between having close friends and age, sex, and being a parent are the same offline and online. Migrants who use internet are less likely to have close friends offline, but migrants who are Facebook users are more likely to have close friends online, suggesting that digital relationships may compensate for the potential lack of offline close friendships among older migrants

Rock, rap, or reggaeton?: assessing Mexican immigrants' cultural assimilation using Facebook data

The degree to which Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are assimilating culturally has been widely debated. To examine this question, we focus on musical taste, a key symbolic resource that signals the social positions of individuals. We adapt an assimilation metric from earlier work to analyze self-reported musical interests among immigrants in Facebook. We use the relative levels of interest in musical genres, where a similarity to the host population in musical preferences is treated as evidence of cultural assimilation. Contrary to skeptics of Mexican assimilation, we find significant cultural convergence even among first-generation immigrants, which problematizes their use as assimilative “benchmarks” in the literature. Further, 2nd generation Mexican Americans show high cultural convergence vis-à-vis both Anglos and African-Americans, with the exception of those who speak Spanish. Rather than conforming to a single assimilation path, our findings reveal how Mexican immigrants defy simple unilinear theoretical expectations and illuminate their uniquely heterogeneous character

AI for social good: social media mining of migration discourse

The number of international migrants has steadily increased over the years, and it has become one of the pressing issues in today’s globalized world. Our bibliometric review of around 400 articles on Scopus platform indicates an increased interest in migration-related research in recent times but the extant research is scattered at best. AI-based opinion mining research has predominantly noted negative sentiments across various social media platforms. Additionally, we note that prior studies have mostly considered social media data in the context of a particular event or a specific context. These studies offered a nuanced view of the societal opinions regarding that specific event, but this approach might miss the forest for the trees. Hence, this dissertation makes an attempt to go beyond simplistic opinion mining to identify various latent themes of migrant-related social media discourse. The first essay draws insights from the social psychology literature to investigate two facets of Twitter discourse, i.e., perceptions about migrants and behaviors toward migrants. We identified two prevailing perceptions (i.e., sympathy and antipathy) and two dominant behaviors (i.e., solidarity and animosity) of social media users toward migrants. Additionally, this essay has also fine-tuned the binary hate speech detection task, specifically in the context of migrants, by highlighting the granular differences between the perceptual and behavioral aspects of hate speech. The second essay investigates the journey of migrants or refugees from their home to the host country. We draw insights from Gennep's seminal book, i.e., Les Rites de Passage, to identify four phases of their journey: Arrival of Refugees, Temporal stay at Asylums, Rehabilitation, and Integration of Refugees into the host nation. We consider multimodal tweets for this essay. We find that our proposed theoretical framework was relevant for the 2022 Ukrainian refugee crisis – as a use-case. Our third essay points out that a limited sample of annotated data does not provide insights regarding the prevailing societal-level opinions. Hence, this essay employs unsupervised approaches on large-scale societal datasets to explore the prevailing societal-level sentiments on YouTube platform. Specifically, it probes whether negative comments about migrants get endorsed by other users. If yes, does it depend on who the migrants are – especially if they are cultural others? To address these questions, we consider two datasets: YouTube comments before the 2022 Ukrainian refugee crisis, and during the crisis. Second dataset confirms the Cultural Us hypothesis, and our findings are inconclusive for the first dataset. Our final or fourth essay probes social integration of migrants. The first part of this essay probed the unheard and faint voices of migrants to understand their struggle to settle down in the host economy. The second part of this chapter explored the viability of social media platforms as a viable alternative to expensive commercial job portals for vulnerable migrants. Finally, in our concluding chapter, we elucidated the potential of explainable AI, and briefly pointed out the inherent biases of transformer-based models in the context of migrant-related discourse. To sum up, the importance of migration was recognized as one of the essential topics in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Thus, this dissertation has attempted to make an incremental contribution to the AI for Social Good discourse

Towards a Resolution of Ethnic Comparative Research with Minority and Majority Adolescents

Developmental contexts are becoming increasingly culturally diverse. Because of changing minority-majority dynamics and an increased awareness of inequities rooted in racially stratified societies, the study of developmental processes in different ethnic groups of adolescents has become a challenge. How can research shift the focus from describing to explaining group differences based on psychological and social mechanisms? How can researchers accurately investigate differences and similarities between groups without running the risk of perpetuating a deficit-oriented perspective? An ethnic comparative perspective, although often criticised (e.g., promotes power imbalance between ethnic groups, encourages ‘otherness’), can complement other research methods to explain immigrant youth’s adjustment in different contexts, identify structural barriers to a positive adaptation and, determine underlying variables (e.g., socioeconomic status, opportunity differentials) that create differences that may otherwise be attributed to culture. This dissertation focuses on comparative approaches with ethnic minority and majority youth and shows how these can be utilised to understand developmental processes in various ethnic groups. I present three alternative ways to do this, together with empirical evidence based on cultural variance between minority (i.e., adolescents themselves or at least one parent born outside Germany; shared experience of belonging to a minority group) and majority (i.e., no migration history in their own or their parents’ generation; shared experience of belonging to a majority group) groups. In the first study, I ‘explain away’ minority–majority differences in developmental trajectories of life satisfaction and academic self-efficacy. This approach is performed with the particular research question of how specific features of the home learning environment (e.g., learning conditions at home and parental involvement) can improve psychological and school adjustment. It also shows that student–teacher communication and family support are important factors that can improve home learning in both groups. As explaining away ethnic disparities may not always be possible, in the second study I compare minority and majority student–teacher dyads by drawing on multicultural education theory and add group–specific predictors. I investigate how students and their classroom teachers perceive the teacher–student relationship quality and which predictors at the student-level and classroom-level explain differences in students’ and teachers’ perceptions. The third study adopts a person-oriented approach, as an opportunity to study youth from different ethnic groups (i.e., ethnic German diaspora adolescents who migrated from the former Soviet Union to Germany, Russian Jews who migrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel, and majority adolescents in Germany) without an ethnic comparative mindset. This study uncovers subgroups of adolescents based on their perceived social support trajectories and identifies developmental and acculturation-related variables as predictors of subgroup membership. I conclude with a debate on the ethnic comparative approach, as well as other approaches (e.g., intersectional research) that may ensure a more comprehensive picture of youth adjustment in highly diverse contexts

The laws of "LOL": Computational approaches to sociolinguistic variation in online discussions

When speaking or writing, a person often chooses one form of language over another based on social constraints, including expectations in a conversation, participation in a global change, or expression of underlying attitudes. Sociolinguistic variation (e.g. choosing "going" versus "goin'") can reveal consistent social differences such as dialects and consistent social motivations such as audience design. While traditional sociolinguistics studies variation in spoken communication, computational sociolinguistics investigates written communication on social media. The structured nature of online discussions and the diversity of language patterns allow computational sociolinguists to test highly specific hypotheses about communication, such different configurations of listener "audience." Studying communication choices in online discussions sheds light on long-standing sociolinguistic questions that are hard to tackle, and helps social media platforms anticipate their members' complicated patterns of participation in conversations. To that end, this thesis explores open questions in sociolinguistic research by quantifying language variation patterns in online discussions. I leverage the "birds-eye" view of social media to focus on three major questions in sociolinguistics research relating to authors' participation in online discussions. First, I test the role of conversation expectations in the context of content bans and crisis events, and I show that authors vary their language to adjust to audience expectations in line with community standards and shared knowledge. Next, I investigate language change in online discussions and show that language structure, more than social context, explains word adoption. Lastly, I investigate the expression of social attitudes among multilingual speakers, and I find that such attitudes can explain language choice when the attitudes have a clear social meaning based on the discussion context. This thesis demonstrates the rich opportunities that social media provides for addressing sociolinguistic questions and provides insight into how people adapt to the communication affordances in online platforms.Ph.D