Should I Stay or Should I Go?
First-Generation, Low-Income Identity Disclosures in College-Related Social Media Communities
This blog post summarizes the paper “Social Media and College-Related Social Support Exchange for First-Generation, Low-Income Students: The Role of Identity Disclosures,” which will be presented at CSCW ’23 in October 2023 and published in the Proceedings of ACM in Human-Computer Interaction (PACM).
Full citation: Pyle, C., Ellison, N. B., & Andalibi, N. (2023). Social Media and College-Related Social Support Exchange for First-Generation, Low-Income Students: The Role of Identity Disclosures. In Proceedings of ACM Human-Computer Interaction (PACM). DOI forthcoming.
First-generation, low-income (FGLI) students face financial and social obstacles to accessing higher education in the U.S. Social obstacles include the access to social capital and social support needed to navigate college application and selection processes.
First-generation, low-income students often lack people in their in-person networks who can provide them with college-related social support. They also face stigmatization, which can make it hard for them to disclose their first-generation, low-income identities to teachers and guidance counselors who may be able to provide support.
Many first-generation, low-income students turn to social media to seek college-related information and mentors and develop college-going aspirations.
But not all uses of social media are the same. Certain activities on social media are linked to more benefits than others, including disclosure of one’s identities and experiences. Disclosure of one’s identity on social media is linked to social support exchange, especially for people embodying marginalized and stigmatized identities.
Bridging research on first-generation, low-income students, and college access with research on disclosure, social support, and social media, we ask:
During the college application and selection processes…
1. How do FGLI identity disclosures on social media platforms facilitate or disrupt students’ access to college-related social support?
2. How do FGLI students describe characteristics of ideal social media environments that would allow them to find needed support?
We conducted interviews with twenty students who had recently completed the college application and selection process. We asked about their experiences applying to college, how they used social media when applying to college, and about their experiences disclosing their first-generation, low-income identities on social media.
We find that:
- Identity disclosures facilitated college-related social support exchange, especially in online communities with other first-generation, low-income students.
“If … I’m not really sure what a certain term means, or how to research certain things, or how to respond to certain emails for interviews for colleges, things like that… I can definitely ask them and I feel so confident.” — P3
2. Stigmatizing responses to identity disclosures disrupted access to college-related social support.
“Once I posted on Reddit, I was like, ‘Oh hey, I got into this school,’ and there is a person that responded to me and they said, ‘Congrats on being an underrepresented minority and first gen because I doubt you would have gotten in otherwise.’ And that was very discouraging… it made me feel like I didn’t really deserve my acceptance to that school.” -P5
3. Students wanted improvements to Reddit’s content moderation systems to curb stigmatization of FGLI students while avoiding censorship.
“Because I know one of my friends got called the N-word on one of these subreddits. And he was very hurt by it… [but] you also can’t ban words like underrepresented minority or low-income, first-gen, because these are words that people use to have conversations about their challenges.” — P5
From our findings, we make several contributions, including:
- Extending the privileged poor framework to the social media context
“Privileged poor” students are exposed to “an early introduction of the world they will enter in college” (Jack, 2019), while “doubly disadvantaged” students are both low-income and lack familiarity with the environments of many postsecondary institutions. While Jack (2019) discusses college preparatory schools and programs as ways that “doubly disadvantaged” students become part of the “privileged poor,” we argue that social media interactions can help students shift between the “doubly disadvantaged” and “privileged poor” categories.
2. Extending the social transition machinery framework to the college access context and introducing the concept of social transition disruptors. Social transition machinery “describes the ways that, for people facing life transitions, multiple social media sites remain separate and serve different purposes yet work together to facilitate life transitions” (Haimson, 2018). Transitioning from home communities to post-secondary institutions can be particularly difficult and stressful. Findings from this study corroborate that social media interactions such as identity disclosures can facilitate and disrupt this transition.
3. Describing the phenomenon and implications of online support space abandonment.
Many participants reported either considering support space abandonment or actually abandoning support spaces on Reddit where they reported experiencing the most stigma in response to their identity disclosures. Abandoning support spaces on Reddit could effectively curb some of the emotional hardships associated with these experiences. However, it can also prevent students from accessing college related social support, which many participants described as valuable outcomes of their experiences on college-specific subreddits.
4. Providing design recommendations to bolster existing content moderation efforts on Reddit.
Content warnings represent one means by which designers can help alleviate socioeconomic stigmatization on Reddit, render subreddits safer spaces for FGLI college-related social support exchanges, avoid censorship, and enable FGLI students to enact agency and potentially build resilience to stigmatization.
Our paper offers greater detail on these findings and contributions. Read the full paper here!
References
Haimson, O. (2018). Social media as social transition machinery. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2(CSCW), 1–21.
Jack, A. A. (2019). The privileged poor: How elite colleges are failing disadvantaged students. Harvard University Press.
