۱- Introduction

۲- Related work

۳- Methodology

۴- Findings

۵- Final discussion and conclusions

References

Abstract

Social media (SM) are a core component of young people’s lives and have been researched in relation to relationship building and maintenance. While SM are known to be useful in supporting life transitions for young people, we know little about the specific use patterns or activities associated with social adjustment during the specific transition to university. We explore the use of social media during the student transition to university in relation to theories of social comparison and community building and describe a three stage process which accounts for this transition. Participants move through the stages of affirmation, assimilation and integration similar to other life transitions, but in doing so, we reveal the importance of the intersection between offline and online activities and highlight the benefits and limitations of SM use in this transitional period.

Introduction

Adolescents rely upon social media (SM) as a core component of their social lives (Boyd, 2014; Yang & Brown, 2013) and will typically use SM to build new peer affiliations, manage existing relationships and stay informed about social activities within their network (Lampe, Ellison, & Steinfield, 2006; Pempek, Yermolayeva, & Calvert, 2009). It is not surprising, then, that young people can find SM especially useful when moving from home to a new university environment. These ‘emerging adults’ experience marked change at this time, and use online services to bridge these kinds of life transitions (Orzech, Moncur, Durrant, & Trujillo-Pisanty, 2016). University students have demonstrated that they use SM when searching for new relationships or maintaining existing friendships (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2011; Lampe et al., 2006; Pempek et al., 2009) and SM resources are particularly important for first year students seeking to build new relationships and establish a sense of community at college (DeAndrea, Ellison, LaRose, Steinfield, & Fiore, 2012). Yet, little is known about how specific use patterns or activities are associated with social adjustment to university; how students use SM and digital communication to establish new communities, as well as maintain existing ones; how students balance their online and offline identities during this process; and finally the possible drawbacks of SM use during these transitional periods. This study addresses these questions. This empirical paper reports on a study of first year undergraduate students in the UK in relation to their use of SM when transitioning from home to university in order to understand the role played by SM in their transition. We contribute to this discussion by identifying similarities between our work and the theoretical stages identified in previous work exploring when people cross borders or cultures, as in the example of expatriates living abroad (Mao & Shen, 2015), and literature on people coping with acculturation. The paper is structured as follows: we describe related work in terms of SM use in young adults, with a particular emphasis on the literature on social comparison and identitymanagement within SM, and a review of research surrounding the role of SM in community building and the much smaller literature on SM use when making the transition to university. We then outline and justify our own study, which uses novel methodology to capture and interpret SM use during times of transition.