Previous research in the field has taken a variety of focuses and a mix of research methods have been used to draw empirical evidence-based conclusions on the nature of undergraduate student transitions. Given this, at the start of the project I thought it was important to map the key issues to be explored in this research, taking into account the overarching aim of the study. I therefore identified the following as key areas of exploration to include in the line of enquiry: student‘s simultaneous transitions, students‘ personal communities and interpersonal relationships, and social media communication technologies and their effect on the processes of interaction. As the literature suggests, it is a transition which is made of multiple simultaneous transitions and new experiences
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and so it was important to take into consideration that the transitionary period to university should not be viewed simply as a singular, isolated life course transition. Conceptualising the period in isolation of the peripheral events which take place could have been potentially harmful to the findings of the research. In this research I therefore sought to include an exploration of the students transition to adulthood, experience of leaving home, and changes to the structure of their interpersonal relationships and personal communities within the context of their transition to higher education. In light of developing communication technologies and conceptualisation of the current cohort of students entering higher education as millennials, I wanted to explore how students negotiated their interpersonal relationships during the period, particularly focusing on the role of social media.
Following the literature review it became apparent that, for young people most predominantly, the transition to university is an important and complex life course experience. This was something I knew from my own experiences as an undergraduate student. I applied to university via UCAS in the 2007/08 academic year, and started university in the 2008/09 academic year. At this point in time, UCAS had designed a social media platform for students who had applied to university. The aim of the platform was to provide students with an opportunity to meet other students who had applied to the same universities as them. The design was such that, on signing up using school/college email address and unique UCAS number, students were able to connect with other people who were going to be entering university in the same academic year as them, and who were considering the same universities. On reflection, it was a platform built specifically to encourage students to begin building social connections with others as they made their choice about which university to attend. I saw it being used by students as a space, where, in beginning the building of their social connections, they started to feel at ease about their transition to university, shared anxieties with other students, and made social connections with other students before moving to university. One of the most striking elements of the platform was that it gave people the opportunity to meet other students prior to the physical relocation that transitioning to university
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entails. In my personal experience, it also gave me the opportunity to develop social connections with people who I think I may never have met once at university.
Once we (myself and other students) had gone beyond the general conversation of ‗Hi, how are you? What are you studying?, some conversations and relationships4 in their infancy began to migrate onto other social media platforms, predominantly Facebook. From my perspective this appeared to be a natural transition and in the same way as friendships in day-to-day life naturally develop, only some connections migrated across onto Facebook. The ‗Friending‘5 process added an element of intimacy and real life into the conversations. Because I didn‘t Friend everyone I talked to on the platform, the use of Facebook as an external media meant that it became a more personal relationship. Further to this, I noticed that it was via this group that students began discussing setting up Facebook pages and groups to find people who were going to be in the same halls of residence as them. It is not my intention to suggest that this occurred only as a result of the site and wouldn‘t have happened naturally without it, but from my personal experience it had an unquestionable influence on the social connections that I developed in the weeks leading up to my transition and in my first few weeks at university. Like every social connection, you don‘t get on with everyone, but I made lifelong connections via the UCAS platform in addition to meeting people through the ‗traditional‘ means (i.e. halls of residence, groups and societies).
Following on from this reflection, I revisited previous research I had undertaken within a similar field. Prior to embarking on a PhD, I had undertaken earlier postgraduate research in which undergraduate student use and strategic management of Facebook was explored from a Goffmanian theoretical perspective. Though not the focal point of that research, a number of participants in the research discussed their use of social media as a tool to facilitate their friendship ties both with their friends at home and university. This raised several questions:
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‗Relationship‘ as an umbrella term and includes: acquaintanceships, friendships, and romantic relationships.
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Facebook uses ‗Friend‘ to describe the connection between two members on the site. To avoid confusion within this thesis, ‗friend‘ is used when referring to an offline relationship and ‗Friend‘ is used specifically when referring to the social connection developed on Facebook.
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● How do students manage and build their ‗personal communities‘ during the transition to university
● What sources of support do university friends give?
● Given technological advancements, how has social media changed the way in which individuals are able to build continuity in their relationships once they have transitioned to university?
Combining my reflections on my own experience as an undergraduate with my earlier postgraduate dissertation, this research originally intended to investigate the effects of social media communications on interpersonal relationships, in particular friendship, within the context of student transitions to university. Initial research questions centred on how social media was being utilised by transitioning students to facilitate interaction with their social support networks, and what affect this was having on the relationship. However, in order to gain an in-depth understanding of these issues and questions, I thought it was important to widen the scope and explore the transitional period with a broad focus. The scope of the study was therefore altered slightly to place more focus on the general experience of the transition and general use of social media rather than focus being placed on whether friendship could maintained and facilitated partially or fully through social media/ social networking sites.