Elsevier

Computers in Human Behavior

Volume 45, April 2015, Pages 204-212
Computers in Human Behavior

Social media usage and acculturation: A test with Hispanics in the U.S.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.12.018Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Social media usage affects Hispanics’ acculturation into the American society.

  • Use of social media in English and Spanish leads to different effects.

  • Use of English social media helps Hispanics assimilate to the American culture.

  • Use of Spanish social media reinforces Hispanics’ ethnic cultural identification.

  • Hispanics with various demographic characteristics use social media differently.

Abstract

Dominating the media landscape today, social media are cultural institutions that influence users’ cultural orientation. This study focused on how using social media might strengthen or weaken people’s tendency toward certain cultural value systems. Specifically, how English and Spanish social media usage affected Hispanic users’ acculturation into the American culture was examined. Through a survey of 996 self-identified Hispanic respondents in the U.S., it was found that English social media usage helped them develop strong orientation toward the mainstream American culture, while Spanish social media consumption reinforced their ethnic Hispanic cultural identification. This study further examined whether Hispanics with various demographic characteristics used social media differently and acculturated into the American society to different degrees.

Introduction

There has been a tremendous growth in social media research over the past few years (see Wilson, Gosling, & Graham, 2012, for a review of Facebook research as an example). Many prior studies have discussed why the general public adopts social media in English and examined the effects of using social media, including the construction of personal identity, formation of social capital, and real-world voting behavior (e.g., Bond et al., 2012, Ellison et al., 2007, Raacke and Bonds-Raacke, 2008, Zhao et al., 2008). A few other studies touched upon the topic of how ethnic groups engage with social media in languages other than English such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (e.g., Kim and Yun, 2008, Qiu et al., 2013, Takahashi, 2010). Through an extensive literature review, however, it is surprising to find that research focusing on how Hispanics use social media is very limited. Given Hispanics’ increasing population size and voting power in the U.S. (PBS, 2012, US Census Bureau, 2010), and particularly, their active role in shaping the social media trends (Fox News Latino, 2013), understanding their online behavior with regard to social media usage bears both theoretical and practical importance. The current study aims to shed light in this research direction by exploring the relationship between Hispanics’ social media usage and their acculturation into the American society. Based on Kaplan and Haenlein’s (2010) framework, we examine how Hispanics in the U.S. use six different types of social media across two languages (English and Spanish), and further investigate how different levels of social media usage frequency influence their orientation toward the mainstream American culture and the ethnic Hispanic culture.

Specifically, we consider social media as an example of cultural products that are “tangible, shared representations of culture” (Lamoreaux & Morling, 2012, p. 300). Regardless of different formats, social media help users connect to each other, convey the cultural meanings embedded within the shared content, and influence users’ cultural orientation. According to Qiu et al. (2013), people can participate in multiple social media platforms without changing their physical locations, and they are likely to behave in accordance with the cultural connotations implied by a particular platform. Thus, we posit that Hispanics with different preferences and usage patterns of English versus Spanish social media will acculturate into the American society to different degrees. Past research has demonstrated that traditional mass media consumption such as television viewing affects how ethnic individuals acculturate into the American culture (e.g., Chaffee et al., 1990, Kim, 1977, Shoemaker et al., 1985, Stilling, 1997, Subervi-Velez, 1986, Yang et al., 2004), but no known study has examined the relationship between social media usage and acculturation. To advance theoretical understandings of acculturation and media consumption, we propose to include social media usage in the acculturation model as a key factor and test this proposition with a national survey of Hispanics in the U.S.

Section snippets

Acculturation and Hispanics

Acculturation has conventionally been defined as the process adopted by ethnic individuals to acquire social norms and values of dominant reference groups in the mainstream society (Kim, 1979). Earlier acculturation studies tended to use uni-dimensional models to depict this process in a linear continuum fashion from no acculturation to full acculturation, assuming that ethnic individuals would gradually lose their heritage identity to achieve full acculturation (Bauman, 2005). Recent

Survey respondents

To test the hypotheses and answer the research questions, we conducted a survey with 996 self-identified Hispanic respondents (gender: 51.0% male; age: M = 37.12, SD = 15.70, min. = 14.00, max. = 83.00) residing in the U.S. Most of the respondents were born in the U.S. (70.0%), but their countries of origin varied (U.S.: 32.7%, Mexico: 21.2%, Puerto Rico: 8.4%, Cuba: 7.1%, others: 30.6%). On average, they had stayed in the U.S. for 31.91 years (SD = 17.57, min. = .50, max. = 83.00).

The majority of survey

Structural equation modeling analyses

To test the five hypotheses, structural equation modeling analyses were performed in SPSS AMOS 21. As depicted in Fig. 1, the six latent variables in the model were English social media usage, more popular English social media, less popular English social media, Spanish social media usage, American culture orientation, and Hispanic culture orientation. Survey respondents’ self-reported usage frequency of six types of English and Spanish social media were observed variables. Their scores on the

Theoretical implications

As suggested by Lamoreaux and Morling (2012), culture can be observed in cultural products such as advertising, television, architecture, and law. In this study, we regard social media as another example of cultural products and examine their effects from an acculturation perspective. The unique contribution of this research to the literature can be interpreted from the following angles.

First, this study is one of the earliest to examine how Hispanics in the U.S. use social media and how the

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