research-article

Navigating Media Use: Chinese Parents and Their Overseas Adolescent Children on WeChat

Authors: Rui Zhou, Zhonghe Wen, Muchao Tang, Betsy DiSalvoAuthors Info & Claims

DIS '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems

Pages 1025 - 1037

https://doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064701

Published: 10 June 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In many Chinese families, adolescent children are moving abroad to pursue higher education. Due to cultural issues and China's One-Child Policy, parents have high expectations for their children and are willing to invest time and money to help them build a successful future. In this study, we interviewed 9 Chinese students in undergraduate or graduate programs in the US and 15 Chinese parents in China whose children are studying abroad about their family communications. Parents and students used a variety of media, and families negotiated how each medium was used. Most families eventually migrated to communicate through WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese based cross-platform instant messaging service. The negotiation of what medium to use, how to use and when to use specific media was tied the students' and parents' goals to construct a positive presentation of self. Based upon these findings we offer design considerations for cross-cultural, family and intimate long-distance communication media.

References

[1]

Dominic Barton, Yougang Chen, and Amy Jin. 2013. Mapping China's middle class. McKinsey Quarterly. Retrieved from http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/ourinsights/mapping-chinas-middle-class

[2]

Diana Baumrind. 1971. Current Patterns of Parental Authority. Developmental Psychology 4, 1, Pt.2: 1-- 103.

[3]

Peter Bodycott. 2009. Choosing a Higher Education Study Abroad Destination: What Mainland Chinese Parents and Students Rate as Important. Journal of Research in International Education 8, 3: 349--373.

[4]

Deana Brown and Rebecca E Grinter. 2012. Takes a Transnational Network to Raise a Child: The Case of Migrant Parents and Left-behind Jamaican Teens. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp '12), 123--132.

Digital Library

[5]

Rachel Chang. 2016. Here's What China's Middle Classes Really Earn -- and Spend - Bloomberg. Bloomberg. Retrieved January 10, 2017 from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-0309/here-s-what-china-s-middle-class-really-earn-andspend

[6]

Yi-Fan Chen and James E. Katz. 2009. Extending family to school life: College students' use of the mobile phone. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 67, 2: 179--191.

Digital Library

[7]

Yunnuo Cheng and Raluca Budiu. 2016. Scan and Shake: A Lesson in Technology Adoption from China's WeChat. Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved December 29, 2016 from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/wechat-qr-shake/

[8]

Yunnuo Cheng and Jakob Nielsen. 2016. WeChat: China's Integrated Internet User Experience. Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved December 29, 2016 from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/wechat-integratedux/

[9]

Lynn Schofield Clark. 2014. The Parent App: Understanding Families in the Digital Age. Oxford University Press.

[10]

Aileen Clarke. 2015. See How the One-Child Policy Changed China. National Geographic. Retrieved from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/151113datapoints-china-one-child-policy/

[11]

Joanie B Connell, Gerald A Mendelsohn, Richard W Robins, and John Canny. 2001. Effects of Communication Medium on Interpersonal Perceptions. In Proceedings of the 2001 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP '01), 117--124.

Digital Library

[12]

Alexa C Curtis. 2015. Defining Adolescence. Journal of Adolescent and Family Health 7, 2. Retrieved March 28, 2017 from http://scholar.utc.edu/jafh

[13]

Thomas Dalsgaard, Mikael B Skov, Malthe Stougaard, and Bo Thomassen. 2006. Mediated Intimacy in Families: Understanding the Relation Between Children and Parents. In Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC '06), 145--152.

Digital Library

[14]

Hilary Davis, Mikael B Skov, Malthe Stougaard, and Frank Vetere. 2007. Virtual Box: Supporting Mediated Family Intimacy Through Virtual and Physical Play. In Proceedings of the 19th Australasian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction: Entertaining User Interfaces (OZCHI '07), 151--159.

Digital Library

[15]

Betsy DiSalvo and Parisa Khanipour Roshan. 2014. Medium Probes: Exploring the Medium Not the Message. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '14), 239--248.

Digital Library

[16]

Sanford M. Dornbusch, Philip L. Ritter, P. Herbert Leiderman, Donald F. Roberts, and Michael J. Fraleigh. 1987. The Relation of Parenting Style to Adolescent School Performance. Child Development 58, 5: 1244--1257.

[17]

Vanessa L. Fong. 2004. Heavy is the Head of the "Little Emperor": Pressure, Discipline, and Competition in the Stratification System. In Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China's One-Child Policy. Stanford University Press, 87--126.

[18]

Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne, and Elena Pacenti. 1999. Cultural Probes. interactions 6, 1: 21--29.

Digital Library

[19]

William W Gaver, Andrew Boucher, Sarah Pennington, and Brendan Walker. 2004. Cultural Probes and the Value of Uncertainty. interactions 11, 5: 53--56.

Digital Library

[20]

Erving Goffman. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books, New York, NY, USA.

[21]

Connie Golsteijn and Elise Den Hoven. 2013. Facilitating Parent-teenager Communication Through Interactive Photo Cubes. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 17, 2: 273--286.

Digital Library

[22]

Kathryn Greene and Laura S Brinn. 2003. Messages Influencing College Women's Tanning Bed Use: Statistical versus Narrative Evidence Format and a Self-Assessment to Increase Perceived Susceptibility. Journal of Health Communication 8, 5: 443--461.

[23]

Barbara Hofer. 2008. The Electronic Tether: Parental Regulation, Self-Regulation, and the Role of Technology in College Transitions. Journal of the First-Year Experience & Students in Transition 2, 16: 9--24.

[24]

Kwang-kuo Hwang. 1987. Face and Favor: The Chinese Power Game. American Journal of Sociology 92, 4: 944--974.

[25]

Lilly Irani, Janet Vertesi, Paul Dourish, Kavita Philip, and Rebecca E. Grinter. 2010. Postcolonial Computing: A Lens on Design and Development. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '10, 1311--1320.

Digital Library

[26]

Nicolas Jucha. 2012. QQ - China' instant messenger. gbtimes. Retrieved January 15, 2017 from http://gbtimes.com/world/qq-chinas-instant-messenger

[27]

Tejinder K Judge and Carman Neustaedter. 2010. Sharing Conversation and Sharing Life: Video Conferencing in the Home. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10), 655--658.

Digital Library

[28]

Shipra Kayan, Susan R Fussell, and Leslie D Setlock. 2006. Cultural Differences in the Use of Instant Messaging in Asia and North America. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '06), 525--528.

Digital Library

[29]

Dune Lawrence. 2016. Life in the People's Republic of WeChat. Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved December 16, 2016 from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-0609/life-in-the-people-s-republic-of-wechat

[30]

Jun Li. 2001. Expectations of Chinese Immigrant Parents for Their Children's Education: The Interplay of Chinese Tradition and the Canadian Context. Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation 26, 4: 477.

[31]

Marshall McCluhan. 1964. The Medium is the Message. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 404--5.

[32]

Matthew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman. 1994. Qualitative Data Analysis. Sage Publications.

[33]

Lu Pan, Feng Tian, Fei Lu, Xiaolong (Luke) Zhang, Ying Liu, Wenxin Feng, Guozhong Dai, and Hongan Wang. 2013. An Exploration on Long-distance Communications Between Left-behind Children and Their Parents in China. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '13), 1147--1156.

Digital Library

[34]

Jiezhong Qiu, Yixuan Li, Jie Tang, Zheng Lu, Hao Ye, Bo Chen, Qiang Yang, and John E Hopcroft. 2016. The Lifecycle and Cascade of WeChat Social Messaging Groups. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW '16), 311-- 320.

Digital Library

[35]

Diane J Schiano, Christine Burg, Anthony Nalan Smith, and Florencia Moore. 2016. Parenting Digital Youth: How Now? In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '16), 3181--3189.

Digital Library

[36]

Leslie D Setlock and Susan R Fussell. 2010. What's It Worth to You?: The Costs and Affordances of CMC Tools to Asian and American Users. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '10), 341--350.

Digital Library

[37]

Leslie D Setlock, Susan R Fussell, Eun Ji, and Michaela Culver. 2009. Sorry to Interrupt: Asian Media Preferences in Cross-cultural Collaborations. In Proceedings of the 2009 International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration (IWIC '09), 309--312.

Digital Library

[38]

Leslie D Setlock, Susan R Fussell, and Christine Neuwirth. 2004. Taking It out of Context: Collaborating Within and Across Cultures in Face-toface Settings and via Instant Messaging. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '04), 604--613.

Digital Library

[39]

Leslie Setlock and Susan Fussell. 2011. Culture or Fluency?: Unpacking Interactions Between Culture and Communication Medium. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11), 1137--1140.

Digital Library

[40]

Madeline E Smith, Duyen T Nguyen, Charles Lai, Gilly Leshed, and Eric P S Baumer. 2012. Going to College and Staying Connected: Communication Between College Freshmen and Their Parents. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12), 789--798.

Digital Library

[41]

Laurence Steinberg, Sanford M. Dornbusch, and B. Bradford Brown. 1992. Ethnic differences in adolescent achievement: An ecological perspective. American Psychologist 47, 6: 723--729.

[42]

Yingze Sun, Matthew P Aylett, and Yolanda VazquezAlvarez. 2016. e-Seesaw: A Tangible, Ludic, Parentchild, Awareness System. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '16), 1821-- 1827.

Digital Library

[43]

John C Tang, Tara Matthews, Julian Cerruti, Stephen Dill, Eric Wilcox, Jerald Schoudt, and Hernan Badenes. 2009. Global Differences in Attributes of Email Usage. In Proceedings of the 2009 International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration (IWIC '09), 185--194.

Digital Library

[44]

James Keng Soon Teh, Adrian David Cheok, Yongsoon Choi, Charith Lasantha Fernando, Roshan Lalintha Peiris, and Owen Noel Newton Fernando. 2009. Huggy Pajama: A Parent and Child Hugging Communication System. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC '09), 290--291.

Digital Library

[45]

Sean Upton-McLaughlin. 2013. Gaining and Losing Face in China. The China Culture Corner. Retrieved January 12, 2017 from https://chinaculturecorner.com/2013/10/10/face-inchinese-business/

[46]

Hao-Chuan Wang, Susan F Fussell, and Leslie D Setlock. 2009. Cultural Difference and Adaptation of Communication Styles in Computer-mediated Group Brainstorming. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09), 669--678.

Digital Library

[47]

Hao-Chuan Wang and Susan R Fussell. 2009. Cultural Adaptation of Conversational Style in Intercultural Computer-mediated Group Brainstorming. In Proceedings of the 2009 International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration (IWIC '09), 317--320.

Digital Library

[48]

Xiaobo Wang and Baotong Gu. 2016. The communication design of WeChat: ideological as well as technical aspects of social media. Communication Design Quarterly Review 4, 1: 23--35.

Digital Library

[49]

Yang Wang, Yao Li, Bryan Semaan, and Jian Tang. 2016. Space collapse: Reinforcing, reconfiguring and enhancing Chinese social practices through WeChat. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Icwsm: 427--435.

[50]

Yang Wang, Yao Li, and Jian Tang. 2015. Dwelling and Fleeting Encounters: Exploring Why People Use WeChat -- A Mobile Instant Messenger. Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'15 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2: 1543--1548.

Digital Library

[51]

Pamela Wisniewski, Haiyan Jia, Heng Xu, Mary Beth Rosson, and John M Carroll. 2015. "Preventative" vs. "Reactive": How Parental Mediation Influences Teens? Social Media Privacy Behaviors. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '15), 302--316.

Digital Library

[52]

Marisol Wong-Villacres and Shaowen Bardzell. 2011. Technology-mediated Parent-child Intimacy: Designing for Ecuadorian Families Separated by Migration. In CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '11), 2215-- 2220.

Digital Library

[53]

Sarita Yardi and Amy Bruckman. 2011. Social and Technical Challenges in Parenting Teens? Social Media Use. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11), 3237--3246.

Digital Library

[54]

Svetlana Yarosh. 2008. Supporting Long-distance Parent-child Interaction in Divorced Families. In CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '08), 3795--3800.

Digital Library

[55]

Svetlana Yarosh and Gregory D Abowd. 2011. Mediated Parent-child Contact in Work-separated Families. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11), 1185--1194.

Digital Library

[56]

Svetlana Yarosh, Sarita Schoenebeck, Shreya Kothaneth, and Elizabeth Bales. 2016. "Best of Both Worlds": Opportunities for Technology in CrossCultural Parenting. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16), 635--647.

Digital Library

[57]

2008. China's Only Children Face Great Expectations. NPRorg. Retrieved January 7, 2017 from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php'storyId=

[58]

2015. International Students in the United States. Project Atlas. Retrieved January 10, 2017 from http://www.iie.org/Services/Project-Atlas/UnitedStates/International-Students-InUS#.WHWWWfkrKUn

[59]

2015. Explainer: What was China's one-child policy? BBC News. Retrieved January 10, 2017 from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34667551

[60]

2015. China to end one-child policy and allow two. BBC News. Retrieved January 11, 2017 from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34665539

[61]

2016. Tencent 2016 first quarter total revenue reached 31.995 billion yuan: An increase of 43 percent. Tencent Technology. Retrieved January 11, 2017 from http://tech.qq.com/a/20160518/067853.htm

Cited By

Zhang LYuan YLi JCassinelli AZhu K(2024)WhisperCup: A Design Exploration for Improving the Remote Communication between Chinese Parents and Their Adult Children through Digitally-Augmented Everyday ObjectsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765348:MHCI(1-26)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676534
Pyle CZhang BHaimson OAndalibi N(2024)"I'm Constantly in This Dilemma": How Migrant Technology Professionals Perceive Social Media Recommendation AlgorithmsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373428:CSCW1(1-33)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637342
Jin QYuan YYarosh S(2023)Socio-technical Opportunities in Long-Distance Communication Between Siblings with a Large Age DifferenceProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580720(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3580720
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Navigating Media Use: Chinese Parents and Their Overseas Adolescent Children on WeChat
1. Human-centered computing

Recommendations

Mobile media use by infants and toddlers
Abstract
This study examined mobile media (MM) use patterns by infants and toddlers (36 months old and younger, N = 326) from a family media ecology perspective. Parents' frequency of MM use, their motives for child's use, and child's age ...
Highlights
- Parents' frequency of mobile media (MM) use predicted children's total MM use on our online survey.
Age and gender differences in photo tagging gratifications

The immense popularity of Facebook use among people from varying demographic groups has attracted the attention of communication scholars. While much is known about the age and gender differences in Facebook usage patterns and the general gratifications ...
Social media jealousy and intimate partner violence in young adults’ romantic relationships: A longitudinal study
Highlights
- Social media are a prime location for the emergence of jealousy in romantic relationships.
Abstract
Social media have profoundly transformed young adults’ social interactions, especially within their romantic relationships. For instance, jealousy induced by the partner's activity on social media can cause conflicts that can escalate ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

DIS '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems

June 2017

1444 pages

ISBN:9781450349222

DOI:10.1145/3064663

General Chair:
Oli Mival
Edinburgh Napier University, UK
,
Program Chairs:
Michael Smyth
Edinburgh Napier University, UK
,
Peter Dalsgaard
Aarhus University, Denmark

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 June 2017

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

DIS '17

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

DIS '17: Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2017

June 10 - 14, 2017

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Acceptance Rates

DIS '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 107 of 487 submissions, 22%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

21
Total Citations
View Citations
673
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)74
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10

Reflects downloads up to 12 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Zhang LYuan YLi JCassinelli AZhu K(2024)WhisperCup: A Design Exploration for Improving the Remote Communication between Chinese Parents and Their Adult Children through Digitally-Augmented Everyday ObjectsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765348:MHCI(1-26)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676534
Pyle CZhang BHaimson OAndalibi N(2024)"I'm Constantly in This Dilemma": How Migrant Technology Professionals Perceive Social Media Recommendation AlgorithmsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373428:CSCW1(1-33)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637342
Jin QYuan YYarosh S(2023)Socio-technical Opportunities in Long-Distance Communication Between Siblings with a Large Age DifferenceProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580720(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3580720
Zhang BHaimson OThomas M(2022)The Chinese Diaspora and The Attempted WeChat Ban: Platform Precarity, Anticipated Impacts, and Infrastructural MigrationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35551226:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555122
Liu K(2021)Language choices as audience design strategies in Chinese multilingual speakers’ Wechat postsGlobal Media and China10.1177/205943642110352016:4(391-415)Online publication date: 5-Aug-2021
https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364211035201
Liu ZCheng EZhang XRen X(2021)LUNOST: Connected Tangible Messengers for Enhancing Off-Site ParentTeenager RelationshipsProceedings of the Ninth International Symposium of Chinese CHI10.1145/3490355.3490372(127-132)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3490355.3490372
Gong JYao ZLu ZDing Qzhang yZhang LWang QKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)All in One Group: Current Practices, Lessons and Challenges of Chinese Home-School Communication in IM Group ChatProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445436(1-12)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445436
Lee YChung JSong JChang MKim JKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)Personalizing Ambience and Illusionary Presence: How People Use “Study with me” Videos to Create Effective Studying EnvironmentsProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445222(1-13)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445222
Su SLin XMcElwain A(2021)Parenting, loneliness, and stress in Chinese international students: do parents still matter from thousands of miles away?Journal of Family Studies10.1080/13229400.2021.191054029:1(255-268)Online publication date: 6-Apr-2021
https://doi.org/10.1080/13229400.2021.1910540
Yadav SChakraborty P(2021)Children’s ability to engage in video chatting: Expressiveness, recall and problem solvingJournal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment10.1080/10911359.2021.198879432:8(1070-1088)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2021.1988794
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents