INTER CULTURAL MARRIAGES AND TEXAS TECH STUDENTS

Study on Intercultural Relationships

Study on Intercultural Relationships

ESL 5315
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Snigdha Kshirsagar, Texas Tech University, 2016

 

Abstract

This paper talks about an interesting study related to intercultural relationships/marriages. A survey was done to find answers to some interesting hypotheses. The survey aimed to study the opinions of the Texas Tech and the surrounding town (Lubbock) community. Random people from the campus and city answered the survey. The answers were sorted and analyzed after, according to the individual hypotheses and presented as results. It was seen that the American (Texas Tech & Lubbock) youth are open minded about intercultural relationships. It could also be seen that women were more accepting towards changes in their life for the sake of finding love.

Introduction

We are a group of students from the academic writing course - ESL 5315. As a part of the course curriculum and a topic that intrigued us, we wanted to do a course project on the views of young Texans or Americans on ‘Intercultural Marriage’. Our group chose this topic as we all came from different backgrounds including races, nations, religions, regions, languages, etc. and it typically interested us to know that in a nation so known for its diversity, how intercultural relationships thrived and nourished, and what the views of the American youth about it were.

My personal opinion on intercultural marriage has changed as I came to United States. This happened as I became friends with students from different parts of the world and started to understand them. From an educated but orthodox mind I have become a broad minded person. I believe in humanity more than any other religion now. The person with good in his heart attracts us irrespective of their culture. I would definitely support and encourage an intercultural relationship. I also think it enhances our mindset and improves our understanding of people around us. When I thought about our topic I thought Texas Tech’s student community and even the local community has been so welcoming to accept us, international students, into their daily life. Would they be similarly willing to accept other cultures into the real society? By real society I mean their families. As far as the statistics are concerned, it is very well presented that intercultural marriages are on a rise. The U.S. statistics present a lot of other things related to relationships and breakups; one thing that comes up from all of them is, be it a person of the same culture or different, the fate of their relationship depends on the accommodating and understanding nature of the couple.

Texas Tech is one of the oldest and biggest universities in Texas. It is now a tier one research university according to the latest Carnegie classification of institutions of higher learning education. Apart from the research development, the university has a total student enrollment of 35,893 (Cook, 2016). Students from all over Texas, other states of United States and many different countries study on the same campus. There is a lot of interaction among students from different cultures, religions and races. Thus the scope for the study of our topic is this student population at Texas Tech University. As a society it will be really interesting to know the views of our fellow Texas Tech students about how willing they are to accept this kind of relationship in their or their loved one’s life and what the factors that they think would prove a hindrance or prove to support to such relationships are.

Literature Review

Interracial marriages are no longer considered outlaw and their number has been increasing rapidly since the 1980s (International Encyclopedia of Marriage and Family, 2016). Recently it has been found that 1 in 12 marriages in America is interracial and the percentage share is increasing (The Associated Press, 2012). While the scenario nowadays has changed, this ‘difference’ is not perceived as awfulness but as an insight to understanding other people (O’Neill, 2015). Focusing on the importance of being connected to one’s personality and character and avoiding people due to their race even seem illogical (Guillen, 2016). But yes, many people who have been in intercultural marriages agree that intercultural marriage is a challenging story to live and tell.

For an intercultural marriage to last, the individuals should have the ability to be open to new things in life and accept that life is unpredictable but good (Idamakanti, 2016).  Also couples in intercultural relationships often need to work harder to understand and accept each other (Bahrampour, 2010). Facing family skepticism is just one of the requisites of an intercultural marriage. Sometimes this skepticism can rise to a point where it breaks the family (Pathak, 2010).  But all hope is not lost; once the families are able to figure out topics to talk about that go much deeper than the differences, the bonding becomes easier (Bahrampour, 2010). According to a dating coach, keeping the world and other family members' impacts out of your personal life works best for couples (Hoffman, 2013). The society, rather than considering cross-cultural marriage a shortcoming, should count it as an opportunity to learn best practices from each culture (Arnold, 2008). In the same way, one of the intercultural couples teaches their children the best of Indian as well as American culture (Muddamalle, 2015). Forging new traditions as a path in between the two cultures can be looked at as a way forward for couples in intercultural marriages (Noor, 2015).  Also some studies say that education and age of marriage are important aspects to keep the intercultural marriage going. Once a certain period of the relationship is survived, it often sails smoothly after that. Also, the higher the education, the lesser is the chance of the marriage been broken (Newport, 2015). Considering marital conflicts as the opportunity for learning about each other and not taking arguments personally always helps sustain an intercultural marriage (Glee, 2016).   A distinguished example is a couple who is not only setting an example of how to survive an intercultural marriage but also has made efforts to help other such couples by building a church which is devoted to standing for and mentoring couples of cross-cultural origin (Arnold, 2008). A word of caution from one article (Pathak, 2010) says intercultural marriage shouldn’t be taken an experiment to witness novelty in life.

Hypotheses

As stated in (Pew Research Centre, 2014) 50 percent of Millennials agree that the inter-cultural marriage is good for the society. I think if 50% of American Millennials think so then the Texas Tech’s youth would also turn out to support intercultural marriage. I would be really interested to know from the Texas Tech’s youth if women tend to be more open towards it or men. How far will girls go to find their prince charming? Also, it will be interesting to see the response in an age wise study, for maybe younger people might be more open to it than the older ones.  I expect them to be open minded about this issue specially since they are studying and working together with international students and students from other cultures. They have come to understand it is fun to learn other cultures. The exposure to other cultures right through college would definitely make them more open towards dating people from those cultures. I would also like to analyze the responses according to experience, as to people who have their lives brushed by the experience of intercultural marriage in some way, maybe, they were themselves in a intercultural relationship or their parents were or someone in their family or friends was. After all as they say, experience is the best teacher! I would also like to know to what extent they would go to be with someone from another culture, and what factors are worth sacrificing for true love and peace in such a marriage. Are women more accommodating in their attitude towards the whole change (since that’s what girls are taught)? I think as everything is getting globalized, it is about time that at least college students accept people from other cultures as a part of their life. Also in this so called just world, men and women have established equality in terms of career and other opportunities, but has it been balanced in the most important aspect of our life, marriage, we will find out!

Method

The survey was done on cellphones and driving and intercultural relationships (ICR). The aim was to obtain the opinions of Americans, especially the community members of Texas Tech University and Lubbock. Many interesting things came up when the discussion on the outcomes of such a survey were predicted. My group focused on the intercultural relationships as we found them to be more interesting. We as the ICR group wanted to know the attitude of our audience towards relationships. Particularly we wanted to know if this attitude changed as per age, sex, education and parental influence. Apart from the common aims of the survey, I had a few other things on my mind that I wanted to know. I wanted to know if women were more open minded and accommodating toward ICR; I believed that would be proved true from the survey. I also thought that people who studied in universities like Texas Tech were more open minded towards ICR, since they have more interactions with the international people due to their on campus presence. I also thought experience of such a relationship played a vital role in deciding the course of action for the next opportunity. I thought that younger people would be more likely to say they would sacrifice more things, because at a younger age, we generally think love is the most important aspect of life.

To discuss the physical aspect of the survey, it was made available in the paper form as well as online surveys. I had typed the survey in google forms and sent it to all my American friends, and also collected the answers from random people in the Student Union Building at Texas Tech campus by circulating the paper format survey.  As per the agreement done with the whole class, we decided to approach an equal number of males and females; basically we had to do a minimum of 12 surveys so six male and six female responses were mandatory. They had to belong to the Texas Tech University or Lubbock community. We did have an age limit set on the audience. All the survey takers had to be above 18 years of age, and we encouraged elder people participation.  Additionally, everyone had to do one survey themselves.  We asked many questions that directly related to what we wanted to know from them, for instance after the generic specifics of age, sex, education and location, we asked about the relationship status, if they had experienced ICR, and if they would go for it again. We also aptly asked what kinds of sacrifices they would be willing to make for such a relationship. Did/Would their parents support their ICR?

For better data management, we decided to enter all the responses on Survey Planet so everyone’s survey results would contribute to the results. The website helped generate different statistics which will be discussed in greater details in the following sections. The website presents the data in graphical as well as statistical methods.  This is good to make it easier for the reader to understand our conclusions. 

Results

The total participants in the survey were 229 Americans, mostly studying in Lubbock or staying in Lubbock. Out of the 229 people, 105 were male and 124 were females. We asked them about their relationship status and out the total 229, 126 were single, 43 were married, 57 were in a relationship and 3 were divorced. To list the survey population in terms of age, only 1 person surveyed was below 18, 121 out of the remaining 228 people were from 18-22 years of age while 62 people were 23-27 years of age, 28-35 were 32 in total and 13 were above 35 years of age. All these people were asked the same set of questions based on the hypotheses and literature review. The response was in all cases normal, except that some students didn’t want to be disturbed so preferred not to take the survey. From the hypotheses questions are discussed one by one below.

Texas Tech’s youth would turn out to support intercultural relationship (ICR) as shown in Figure 1.1. So out of the 229 responses, 124 (60 male and 64 female) people said that ICR is good for society, which makes it more than 50% of the population, followed by the opinion of 97 people (42 male and 57 female) who said it does not make a difference to the society, so they think of it as normal, like a same-culture relationship. To our surprise, there were 5 (3 male and 2 female) people who thought  it was not good for the society. If we can see in the below figure 1.2, age distribution of people’s response, if they think ICR as good for society, our hypothesis is confirmed that mostly the so called “youth” (18-22 years & 23-27 years) support ICR in huge numbers followed by mid aged group

(28-35 years) and older people above 35 years.

To have another perspective to the same hypothesis in Figure 1.3, we looked at the population and studied whether Texas Tech’s youth find themselves more supportive toward ICR than their parents. More than half of the population, 114 people (61 female and 53 male), said yes  they feel more supportive of it than their parents, followed by 111 people who find themselves to be as supportive towards ICR as their parents. However only 7 (4 female, 3 male) people were less supportive than their parents. Thus the hypothesis is confirmed and Texas Tech’s youth supports ICR is rightly justified.

An interesting thing that I found is shown in Figure 1.4, most people who are willing support to their child’s marriage are the ones whose parents supported ICR as an idea, and people who will support with a warning or advice are the people whose parents did the same thing. However, people who wouldn’t support ICR are the ones whose parents opposed the idea too. 

As can be seen in the Figure 1.5, women tend to be more open towards ICR than men and how far will they go to find their prince charming! From the total of 229 people surveyed, 124 are women; that means more than 50% are women (54.1%). From the question, is intercultural marriage good for society, analyzed responses show that out of 124 women, 63 think it is, which is again more than 50% of the total population. From the criteria mentioned for the sacrifice for maintaining intercultural marriage, most of the women voted for food and leaving their favorite town for intercultural love, followed by seeing family often, job, anything, family of different religion, and nothing.

I have also analyzed the responses according to experience, as seen in the Figure 1.6, as to people who have their lives brushed by the experience of intercultural marriage in some way? Out of the total 77 people who were in ICR in the past or in ICR relationship presently 31 people said it was a good experience and they would do it again.  The graph below shows that out of the people who think ICR is good for society (43), 30 think they would go for the experience again while 13 seem to have learnt some lesson.  Also it can be seen in the Figure 1.7, that more than 67% (52 out of 77) of the experienced people are willing to get into an ICR again. However, the remaining 33% (24 out of 77) do not think it is worth doing it again and may prefer to get into a same-culture or no relationship.

What factors are worth sacrificing for true love and peace in such a marriage?  From the survey inputs we can find in the Figure 1.8, that most people would readily sacrifice food preferences followed by living in the town they like the best, seeing family as often, having family of different religion than their, being able to have the best job or job they like, anything and nothing.  Also, we found out whether women were more accommodating in their attitude towards the whole change (since that’s what girls are taught). We can also see that for all the sacrifices women are leading and are in the forefront. The only factor where men are leading the survey results is in sacrificing the best job for them and nothing for their intercultural marriages!  Thus the data supports my hypothesis, and women as we are taught are more accomodating towards marriage or maintaining a relationship.

Discussion

There are lot of avenues in this research about intercultural relationships that we can critique in this discussion. About the methods of doing this survey, I think the two surveys should have been separated. It was firstly more than 30 questions. On an average it took people almost 7-10 minutes of their time to get all of them answered. People did not like answering to so many questions. Some of them gave the feedback that if it was only one, either cellphone or ICR, they would have been happier about doing the survey. This was stretching their patience. Also there was a huge shift in the ideas from cellphone and driving to ICR. Many people wondered, why so? Some people thought there was some connection about people in ICR and use of cellphones and seemed lost about it.  As far as which survey was worded better, ICR had better feedback. There is so much research and surveys being conducted on cell phones and its use that they expected better.

I think the results would definitely have been better and more precise had the two surveys been separated. There were instances when people left a few questions blank and these questions had to be filled by us according to their responses, but it would have been better if the survey was kept shorter and thus they would have finished it by themselves; for example; in the ICR survey, all questions seemed to be worded correctly and choices were enough, except in one question, the last one: ‘If you are in an intercultural marriage, would you do it again if you could go to the past?’ Had the question had a ‘not applicable/no idea’ option, many single and inexperienced people would have liked to check that one.  A few people wrote by hand that it is not applicable for them but in the online data entry survey website we couldn’t add the option or skip it, thus  were forced to enter either yes or no. Also for the ease of survey organizing we combined the two topics, ICR and Cellphones, on which several hypotheses were made. If they had been kept separate the responses might have been different due to more simplicity and predictable flow.

 One of my hypotheses was based on this last question, and results have been corrupted due to the inadequacy of options. I was looking forward to experienced people’s (people who are in ICR, who have grown up in ICR, who were in ICR) responses.  I wanted to study the people who had their lives brushed by the tough challenge of ICR. I wanted to see if such people would indulge in the experience again. Now the answers are manipulated and I can’t conclude exactly truly if my hypothesis was correct or not for the whole population. But if we narrow down the results to responses from experienced people (main people under question) we can find that more than two thirds (67%) of these people said they would do it again.

All of the ICR questions were worded to obtain results for the hypotheses. The combinations of various answers with some sorting helped me reach the results for my hypotheses. Hypotheses were carefully chosen so that we found out what the objective of this research was, to understand how the Lubbock community treats ICR. My hypotheses and results mainly focused on finding out the generic response, then narrowing down to people who have experienced ICR, the difference between men and women’s attitudes towards ICR , things that they think are worth giving up for a serious ICR and how does age affect the decision about accepting new cultures. Many of the hypotheses were interdependent and it really helped to have the results downloaded from the internet to an Excel sheet. After sorting and analyzing, all my results agree with my hypotheses.

These results would, if done on a greater population help us to understand the real reasons behind successful relationships and failed relationships or increasing rate of divorces. From the responses almost half of them thought ICR was as normal as any other relationships. The limitation of the study was that it was limited to the Texas Tech community and the main focus was youth; in the future these limitations should be removed and the study should be open to all. And a comparative analysis of responses to normal relationships and an ICR should be done.

What I learnt from this survey and research is that love is the essence of any relationship, the physical race/religion/food etc. do not matter. When I took this survey I said I would sacrifice anything for true love (if it is true). As we grow up and experience things we understand everything isn’t so easy and giving up stuff can be really difficult. But avoiding experience isn’t the right way of doing it. From the many people’s point of view, religion is the most challenging aspect, which is true as it is really a habitual problem. Religion is a set of rules or principles we follow for spiritual outreach, and it can be really difficult to accept another set of rules suddenly. Love towards a person can definitely help us accept it or get over it. Thus sacrifice remains one of the most difficult things that one has to do.  Apart from religion, all the research definitely points out that tolerance is the most important part of being in a relationship. Very few people, as we can observe from the survey results, said they wouldn’t give up anything for their relationship. We all know and understand somewhere that adjustment is the crux of a relationship. Stubbornness and being rigid only harms us and our relationships. I was expecting positive results for all my hypotheses, knowing how open the USA is towards accepting new cultures, already. The only thing that surprised me was the people who said ‘no’ or showed a really negative attitude. These people were mostly in a bad patch or were just opposed to relationships altogether, but mostly the results turned out as expected.

Conclusion

The USA is a great country and the number of people with a welcoming heart for people of different origins or cultures is increasing day by day. This is one of the top qualities of this country, the freedom, not just as a constitutional right but as it is actually practiced here in daily human life; it takes it right to the top. This sets it apart from my country; we Indians definitely are many and have many rights, but when we actually start practicing them, the society turns back on us. An ICR would not be so easily welcomed in India as it is welcomed in the USA. Our parents still not only want us to get married in the same religion but also in the same caste (subsets of religion). India’s youth like me are rebellious towards this but sometimes we give in. Things are changing but at a much slower pace. I would love to see my country as open and welcoming towards ICR as the USA.

Appendix

Survey link – Look at the Intercultural Part!

Graphs for the results

Figure 1.1 Is ICR good for the society?

Figure1.2 Age-wise detailed support distribution

Figure 1.3 Parental influence on ICR support

Figure 1.4 Could you support your child's ICR?

Figure 1.5 Comparing factors to sacrifice

Figure 1.6 Experienced Views

Figure 1.7 Experienced, will you do it?

Figure 1.8 Gender wise comparison of sacrifice factors

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