By Yuan Li
Abstract
This paper was based on a survey, in
which 229 people in Texas Tech University enrolled. It was a project of an academic
writing course. In the survey, we had two groups: one was to investigate about
using cell phones in class and on the driving road; the other one was to learn what
people think about intercultural marriages or relationships. My group was
focusing on the intercultural marriages. By using this survey with doing
statistical analysis and generating pie graphs, we confirmed some hypotheses
that we made before the survey. Also, we recognized that some of my hypotheses
were not accurate. Although we completed the project, we rethought about our questionnaires
and believed that it still had a lot of places to improve.
Keywords: Intercultural
relationships/marriages, survey, Texas Tech
Introduction
The situations and the thoughts
toward cross cultural relationships have changed a lot with time. In old days,
people always got married with those who had similar backgrounds. White people
married with the white. People who came from Mexico would choose a Mexican
partner. Even a girl who lived in a big city would prefer a city guy. However,
recently more and more people have begun their relationship with a girl or guy
with different culture or living experience. Therefore, the intercultural relationships
have become a significant factor in the society, which makes it worth doing
some research.
In my academic writing course, some
of my classmates and I joined this research group to do a survey at Texas Tech
to learn what Tech students think about cross cultural relationships. Texas
Tech has 33,127 students (
Student
Counseling Center of Texas Tech , 2016), of whom most come from Texas and other
parts of the U.S. However, for graduate school, there are more international
students, who provide diversity. In this survey, I decided to study several
aspects which might be important in intercultural relationships. First, I
wanted to know whether people’s families allowed them to begin an intercultural
relationship. Second, were there any pressure which come from religions? Third,
I wanted to know whether the thoughts were different between men and women, for
cross cultural relationships? Finally, I wanted to know if people would make
some changes for adapting to their partners’ cultures or religions.
Our survey was based on Texas Tech students,
including the undergraduates and the graduates. They come from different
cities, or different religions, even from different countries. We did our
questionnaires in the Student Union Building, Library and Livemore in the
Engineering Building and some other places. After doing so, we had more than
two hundred questionnaires to analyze. Finally, I will get the answers of the
questions I am wondering about.
Literature
review
In order to do a good survey, I read some articles, which
were opinions and experiences based on intercultural relationships. According
to the articles, pressures from family, religion and the cultural differences
were considered as critical reasons that made couples break up from each other.
As a proof, from a data set in an article (Newport, 2015), the author said that
the divorce rate was higher in interracial couples than single raced couples,
because many more disagreements existed in intercultural couples, which made
irreconcilable contradictions.
Generally, during my reading, I found
that religious difference is considered as the most critical problem in
intercultural relationships. For example, a Hindu guy from India got married
with a Christian lady who came from Kenya (Pathak, 2010). They said differences
between Hinduism and Christianity made their relation in trouble. In India, the
problem of his wife’s skin made lots of trouble, which was that people judged
her skin and challenged their marriage. Also, the pressure existed in the
Christian world. His father-in-law did not support their marriage, which put
them under criticism from both the church and their family. With the
development of the technology, people from different countries with different
cultures have gotten closer than before. People have become more open-minded.
However, many religions bar their members from starting intercultural
relationships. Perhaps, men have gained more freedom; however, it is not bright
for women, especially in Muslim countries (Tvrtkovic, 2001).
Cultural differences are another
important source of pressure (Muddamalle, 2015). For instance, in traditional
Bengali culture, young people’s marriages are arranged by their parents (Noor,
2015). Therefore, a young woman who works in the U.S. should follow her
parents’ opinion to marry a stranger in her country. However, she found her
true love in an American guy, which is not accepted by her culture. She
suffered a lot when her family said they would never allow this situation. But
finally, she won her love, by proving that she would not forget her belief or
culture to her family, by action.
As shown in the examples above,
influence of families existed everywhere. Generally, family culture was a kind
of tradition. If any actions offended their tradition (Noor, 2015), they would
be upset and annoyed. Especially, in some small area, people in which are more
traditional. They would be unlikely to make some changes to adapt the
development of the society. Besides pressure from religions, cultures and
families, there were some relatively small parts that might cause arguments
during intercultural relationship, which were food preferences, language
differences, home location, etc. (Glee, 2016). Based on my readings and discussions
above, I believed religions would be the hardest barrier faced by intercultural
couples. And also, I believed women would suffer more criticism from their
countries and culture, which meant women always made more sacrifices than men
did when they were trying to maintain intercultural relationships.
Though there were enough pressures
faced by intercultural couples, there were some methods which could help people
maintain their relations. These methods came from the couples who were
successful in their marriage.
First, to learn to understand and
accept each other was a useful method, which may always be ignored (Bahrampour,
2010 and Hoffman, 2013). For example, in an intercultural relationship, people
should think about the other one’s side. By doing this, misunderstandings could
be avoided.
Second, try to adapt to the other
one’s culture (Arnold, 2008). Different cultures had different traditions. In
marriages, people should respect each other’s culture, and try to adapt and
then like it. That would be helpful for resolving arguments.
Third, spend time together as friends
(Adams, 2010). Normally, we were happy to share our thoughts with our friends,
but not our family. Therefore, if you treated your partner like a friend you
would be able to talk to them with gentle temper. That would help increasing
the relationship between couples.
Based on the three points above, we
know that couples in successful marriages always made changes for each other,
especially when people were in such a relationship. Therefore, I thought people
with experiences of intercultural relationship were willing to do more
sacrifices for their partners just because of love in this survey. The
experienced people should include the people who have or had a relationship
with intercultural partners. And also, I thought the children who came from
intercultural families should be included in the experienced group, because
they had opportunities to learn from their parents to how to handle this kind
of marriages (The influence on children will be mentioned in next paragraph).
Children were an important part in
family. Were there any influences on
children who were from intercultural families? Someone said that the children would
have trouble getting along with other children (Ballinger, 2011). But there
were some bright sides. For instance, kids from intercultural families might be
more open-minded than others (Idamakanti, 2016). They would be more accepting
of having an intercultural relationship. Also they would have more patience for
different thoughts from others. In addition, intercultural backgrounds would
help to extend their insight (O’Neill, 2015). That was, they could know two
languages, two cultures, even two countries. Therefore, I thought the children
from intercultural families would have better education, such as language, and
rational thinking, and build good character and also would have more liberty.
For too long, people in intercultural
marriages had suffered. The good news is, with the development of society,
including technology, education and so on, people are more and more open-minded
on intercultural marriages. There should be more intercultural relationships in
the youth generation than these in the older one.
Hypotheses
1. Religious differences will be the hardest
barrier faced by intercultural couples.
2. People from big cities will be more
accepting of intercultural relationships.
3. Women are more willing to make sacrifices
than men do when they are trying to maintain intercultural relationships.
4. Couples who have experiences in
intercultural relationships will say they will make more sacrifices for each
other.
5. People generally perceive children of
intercultural marriages as advanced by being bilingual.
6. Young people are more accepting of
intercultural relationships than their parents.
Method
In this survey we wanted to know
which part was the most difficult aspect for people in intercultural marriages
or relationships, and would cause argument if people were already in one
intercultural relationship. We tried to find out whether people would make some
sacrifices to their partner to maintain their relationship. As we know, people
have become more and more open-minded recently compared with the people in the
old time. Therefore, whether people have had become more supportive of intercultural
relationships is an interesting topic. We wanted to know whether people would
think intercultural relationships would be good for society, themselves and
their future children. Therefore, we made questionnaires on paper and in an
online version.
We asked some questions in the survey. For
example, we asked whether they had experience with intercultural relationships,
to separate the people who had some experience from those who didn’t have
experience. We made two questions (Would your parents/you support intercultural
marriage) to compare the potential differences between two generations. In
addition, a much more straightforward question had been raised, which was “Do
you feel more supportive of it than your parents?” to find out whether people
felt they themselves were more open-minded than their parents. Also, in order
to investigate whether people were willing to make some sacrifices in
intercultural relationships, for example, giving up their faiths or tradition,
and moving to a foreign country, etc. we made a question asking what they would
be willing to sacrifice to maintain an intercultural marriage. I thought there
would be some differences between experienced people and inexperienced people.
The opinions from people on influences which were made by intercultural
relationship would be interesting. If people chose some positive choices, that
meant they were more supportive about intercultural relationships. We should
check their thoughts from different ways via various questions to make sure we
got their true thoughts in their mind.
In order to make sure of the final
success on this survey, i.e. enough data sets including equal male and female,
and different age levels, we made several agreements. First, we should finish
thirteen questionnaires, six females, six males, and one ourselves. Second, we
should do the survey in Texas Tech, or Lubbock, including undergrads, graduate
students and some faculty and stuff.
After we did all the questionnaires,
about two hundred or more, we put them online and then generated statistical
graphs to discuss the questions we were interested in.
Our survey was not perfect, because we
had lots to improve. First, when I was doing the questionnaire, I found some
questions were not accurate or appropriate. For instance, there should be some
other option for question 27 (i.e. strongly agree, agree, sometimes agree).
Also, some additional questions should be in the questionnaire to make it
better. For example, basically we wanted to know the effect of religion in
intercultural relationships. However, we did not ask whether they had a
religion or not. Third, question 33 confused people who were not in
intercultural relationships.
Result
Our result analysis is based on our
hypotheses, which represent the topic we were most interested in, in this
survey. My result part will show the statistical results on our hypotheses one
by one.
We believed that religious differences
would be the hardest barrier faced by intercultural couples. In fact, our data
strongly supported our thought.
As shown in Fig.1 (left), half of the
people believed differences of religions were the most critical problem faced
by intercultural couples. In the remaining part, tradition differences were considered
as another problem in intercultural relationships. Only 5.2% people think food
preferences would prevent people from different cultures from committed
relationships. As shown in Fig.1 (right), for people who were in or had one
intercultural relationship, the percentage results were almost the same. That
means for people with or without experience of intercultural relationships,
religions are considered as the most difficult barrier faced by people. The
slight difference on language difference option tells us that in fact people
have other ways to communicate when they are in love, i.e. body language.
In our hypothesis, we assumed that
people from big cities would be more accepting of intercultural relationships.
Although our data confirmed this guess, the differences between people in big
cities and countryside or small cities were not quite obvious.
As shown in Fig.2, people who come
from bigger cities than Lubbock were more positive towards intercultural
relationships, because they had a higher percentage (~85%) than the average
(~73%). Most of them claimed that they would support their children’s
intercultural relationship without any hesitation. Also, they thought
intercultural relationships were good for our society (~70%).
Focusing on differences between males and females, as our third
hypotheses did, we supposed that women would be willing to make more sacrifices
than men would be. However, our result showed that we underestimated the
sacrificial spirit of men. In addition, we thought that people with experience
would be more sacrificial. However, in fact, no matter with or without
experience of intercultural relationships, people were willing to make
sacrifices for their partners.
As shown in Fig. 3, both males and
females were willing to make sacrifices to maintain intercultural
relationships. In addition, they had the same percentage on that. Also, people
who had experience in intercultural relationships had no differences with
people without experience. Both of them showed that almost half in each group
were willing to give up something for their relationships or marriages.
We thought in our hypothesis that
people would agree that children in intercultural families would have
advantages in being bilingual. In fact, people do think so. In addition,
interestingly, some people hold negative opinions as well.
As shown in Fig. 4, generally people
thought children who grow up in intercultural families would be advantaged by
being bilingual/bicultural/biracial (~75%). Also there were about 70% of people
who believed that children would be more open-minded in intercultural families.
And 68% thought children would be more adaptive to changes and cultures. In
summary, most people hold positive opinions on intercultural relationships in
the aspect of raising children. However, we cannot ignore the fact that about
17% of people claim that children with intercultural backgrounds will be teased
or ridiculed by other kids. Based on the data (Fig. 5), half of them had
experience that they were treated in an unfriendly way as intercultural kids or
heard from their boy/girlfriends. That was because that we assumed that, for
people who grow up in intercultural relationships, they had such an experience
that they were teased by other children. And for people whose partners grow up
in one, the partners would share their experience, which made people hold the
opinion that the kids from intercultural families will be teased or ridiculed
by other kids. The remaining group may got this information from some other
resources, which was not collected by our survey.
We thought that the young generation
would be more open-minded than their older generation, i.e. they would be more
supportive about intercultural relationships. Our data confirms our hypotheses
again.
As shown in Fig.6 (left and middle),
young people were more open-minded than their older generations, since more people
show a positive attitude toward intercultural relationships, i.e. 73% would be
supportive without warning or advice for the young generation and only 50% for
the older generation. However, interestingly, the right figure showed that only
half of people thought they were more supportive than their parents. One thing
we should notice was the option “yes with advice or warning” is much less in
the young people group than that in their parents group. If this option were
classified as a positive attitude, we could see that the result from figure
left and middle matched the result from the figure on the right. It showed a
possibility that older people were more likely to give advice to the younger
generation to make sure they won’t make mistakes during their relationship
period.
In general, our survey data strongly
supported previous hypotheses, and offered reasonable and analytic foundation
for the further discussion part.
Discussion
Our results were based on a small
sample survey, which was not accurate enough. Also, we made some mistakes when
we were preparing the questions on the survey. However, the world is becoming
smaller than ever before because of the development of technology and growth of
society. People who are from different regions or countries are living in the
same city, which makes more intercultural relationships nowadays. Therefore,
some study on intercultural relationships is needed. Our result can be referred
to as a fundamental of further studies, in which more people will enroll and
more logical question will be asked.
In the real world, love can be
defeated by lots of matters. For intercultural relationships, couples face more,
because of the natural differences of the races or cultures. In our result,
religious differences are considered to be the most critical problem faced by
intercultural couples. Since we did not cover the investigation of religions in
our survey, I will make a simple assumption that the population having a
rigorous religion and that which doesn’t are half and half. Interestingly, our
results show that more than 50% people believe religious difference is a big
problem. That means not only people who have religions but also people who have
no rigorous religions claim that religions control and restrict people’s
behavior. Why did people who have no experience with religions think that would
be problematic? I think that one of the reasons is that the television, online
news, and social media affect people’s thoughts and lead them into a biased
way. The other reason is the “surrounding influence”. For example, in my
country, most people don’t have religions, and grow up in a religion-free
background. They are afraid to make some changes, when someone with religion
comes into their life. They will point out the obvious difference – religion,
and refuse any deeper communication to improve their relationship, since they,
without real understanding of the other’s religion, will think the religion
won’t accept this kind of relationship. In one word, it is an excuse to change
nothing for love. From our result and analysis of this problem, I believe that
people exaggerated the role of religion in intercultural relationship. Because
we did not have enough serious options to counteract the religion one, people
were misled by our improper form of question.
As opposed to religion, in fact, I
think different languages should be more challenging. Every relationship needs a
way to communicate. However, in intercultural relationships, people may suffer
from lack of communication, since there are different languages or ways of
thought. The reason for differences between my opinion and our results is that they
are concerned about how to start; however, I am concerned about how to maintain.
The other part of our results is
whether people from bigger cities will be more open-minded. I would like to analyze
this result based on the “surrounding influence” mentioned in the previous
paragraph. As we know, bigger cities, because of more job opportunities and
more convenient life style, received far more immigrants in past 50 years than
small cities, or the countryside. There are more examples of intercultural
relationships or marriages around people from the big city. Therefore, they
will be more accepting and more supportive toward intercultural relationships.
That is that surroundings influence people’s characteristics.
In general, women are considered more
domestic than men. However, our survey shows that women and men are equally
domestic, showing how many sacrifices they will make. Similarly, we believed
that people with experience in intercultural relationships would be more
willing to make sacrifices to their love. But the result showed that whether
people had experience or not, they were willing to make contributions. These
reasons could be because, first, men rarely express their feelings, which made
us misunderstand them; and second, since people without experience are willing
to obtain prefect relationships, they showed high spirit about their future
relationships.
Different generations have their own
thought on intercultural relationships. For young adults on campus, they are
more supportive of intercultural relationships than their parents. Their
parents were likely to offer some advice and suggestions. The reason is that
young people are more open-minded, because they touched the outside world more through
internet than their parents did. And the nature of old generations is giving
advice to their young children, to make sure they live smoothly. That can
explain that more than 26% of parents want to give advice on intercultural
relationships in our result.
The last part is about influence on children
from intercultural families. In general, children from intercultural families
are considered advantaged by being bilingual. Our result confirms this common
agreement. Children are asked to learn languages both from mother’s and
father’s hometown, or they receive education in different countries, which
makes them become expert in two different languages. Unignorably, one group of
people claimed that children from intercultural families will be teased or
ridiculed by other kids. In my opinion, children have no rigorous way to
distinguish right and wrong. All their behaviors come from their knowledge
learned from their parents. Therefore, we can figure it out that some people
still are hostile to intercultural relationships; that is why Trump has so many
supporters. However, more intercultural relationships in big cities are a tendency,
because of the development of society. We cannot change that. All we can do is
to make a harmonious society - fewer biases, better life.
This is only a small, simple survey
in our campus, with only 229 people enrolled in the questionnaires. In further
work, I hope we have opportunities to do questionnaires of the entire campus,
even the whole population of Lubbock citizens. These results will be more
accurate than these. And, we can invite more people who are in intercultural
relationships into our survey to balance our samples. Also, every age level
will be considered, so that we can analyze the thoughts of older generations,
not through the eyes of their children.
Conclusion
From this survey, we summarized the
conclusions we obtained. Those are,
1. People from bigger cities are more supportive
than people from small cities or countryside, because of the influence of more
open-minded surroundings.
2. Unlike young generations who support
intercultural relationships without any conditions, older generations prefer to
give advice or warnings.
3. Because we did some misleading questions in
the survey, that was let people only choose one from all the options, most of
people chose religions as their choice, since there are no equally serious
options like religions.
4. Males and females, experienced and
unexperienced, are equally willing to make sacrifices to maintain intercultural
relationships.
5. Children from intercultural families are perceived
as being advantaged by being bilingual, because they live in the cross-cultural
environment. But some feel that some of them would be treated in an unfriendly way
by other kids.
Figures
Fig.1
Critical aspect in intercultural relationships (left) for all participants
(right) for those who have experience in intercultural relationships
Fig.2
Differences of positive attitudes toward intercultural relationships in bigger
cities and in all participants
Fig. 3 Percentages of people who are willing to make more
sacrifices
Fig. 4 children characteristics in intercultural families
Fig.5 different groups of people who think intercultural
kids will be teased or ridiculed by other kids
 |
  |
Fig. 6 the result of young generation compared with old
generation
Appendix
http://esl5315academicwriting.blogspot.com/2016/03/final-draft-survey.html
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