A new technical report from Microsoft Research.
My name is Sam Jackson, and I am a current Yale College undergraduate (Class of 2011). From September to December 2009 I lived in Beijing while taking classes at Peking University, known colloquially as Beida (stemming from its full name, Beijing Daxue, or [Chinese Characters]). During this time, I had the opportunity to conduct formal interviews with Chinese students about their use of, and relationship to, the internet and its affiliated tools. In addition to this data set, there were countless other informal chances to learn about usage patterns and new trends and developments.
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Before diving in to the interview material and explaining the many fascinating insights contained within, a little background about this effort. The fundamental question posed by this research is simple: How can we understand youth practices in a Chinese context?
Answering this question is anything but.
Several key research questions inform this survey:
a) Where do students go online? What?s cool, and what?s not?
b) Why do Chinese youth use the sites that they do?
c) How (if it all) can different online communities be characterized?
d) What are common usage practices, and how do they meaningfully differ from those in the United States?
e) How do underlying factors in China – institutional and cultural – shape usage of social network sites and tools?
This report is not meant to comprehensively answer all of these questions, but is instead meant to provide an idea of the ways that China is the same or different from what might be expected, and how this can guide future research projects.
A final note and caveat on methodology before continuing: the basis for these findings is principally qualitative research conducted in interview format, corroborated by other firsthand experiences in China. The sample taken for these interviews is very small (n=10) and these students are unusually unrepresentative of their larger peer-groups both at Beida and in China more broadly.
Source: by Samuel Jackson, Yale University, Prepared for Microsoft Research New England
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