Texas Tech University Community’s Attitudes towards Intercultural Marriages and Related Issues

Texas Tech University Community’s Attitudes towards Intercultural Marriages and Related Issues

Songjing Yan

Abstract

With the development of society, more and more people are involved with intercultural marriages, therefore, people’s attitudes toward intercultural marriages are important and interesting to be studied, which were explored in this paper. We were an academic writing class at Texas Tech University (TTU) and we conducted a study on TTU in April 2016. The primary focus of this study was to figure out what percentage of TTU people have experiences with intercultural relationship and what their attitudes are. In total, 229 surveys were collected and analyzed. We found that TTU community are overall open to intercultural marriages and young people or experienced people are more supportive. We also found that people agreed that there exists kinds of difficulties in intercultural marriages and they were willing to make some sacrifices for their love.

Introduction

Intercultural marriage refers to a kind of marriage in which the spouses have different cultural backgrounds, including different races and different religious beliefs. With society developing very quickly, intercultural marriages, or intercultural relationships have been an issue that cannot be neglected anymore. According to the Associated Press, the Pew Research Center did a research study in 2012 and found that the interracial marriages in the U.S. had climbed to 4.8 million, a record 1 in 12 (The Associated Press, 2012). This large percentage means that interracial marriage plays an important role in American society. However, people have different opinions on intercultural marriage, and some social stigmas still persist (Clark, 2014). Therefore, it is meaningful to study how people feel about intercultural relationships.

We were an academic writing class at Texas Tech University (TTU). TTU is a university located in Lubbock, Texas. In fall 2015, Texas Tech University had 10 colleges and 35,893 students in the school. There were 14 students in this class and some visiting scholars as well. Our class aimed to help students who use English as a second language to write English academic articles better.

 We have decided to do a survey of Texas Tech University students’ opinions and experiences of intercultural marriage. We gave out around 250 questionnaires on the TTU campus and did analysis based on the collected data. We were trying to find out whether TTU students thought cross-cultural relationships was a good thing for society or not, what benefits cross-cultural marriages could bring to the spouses and to the society, and what difficulties people had to face when they were in intercultural relationships.

I, as a TTU student, was particularly interested in finding out what percentage of TTU students had or were willing to have a cross-cultural relationship and what they thought the most difficult aspects in an intercultural relationship were.

Literature Review

Intercultural marriage is an issue not only for the couple who are involved in it, but also for the whole society. Marriages in which the couples come from different countries, are different races, or have different religious beliefs can be called intercultural marriages. As we all know, America is famous for its multi-culture. People who grow up with different cultural backgrounds live here and communicate with each other. Therefore, it is not strange that many people are in intercultural relationships. Therefore, our study on intercultural marriage would be meaningful.

Pew Research Center found that about 1 in 12 marriages in America was interracial in 2012 (Clark, 2014). They also found that this percentage had been rising in the last several decades. In the 1980s, only about 3.2% marriages in the U.S. were interracial. As we all know, Texas has pretty diverse population and immigration has made Texas culture diverse and melting. Therefore, we believe that the intercultural relationships will make up to more than 1 in 12 in Texas Tech University.

Another important research study the Pew Research Center did shows that young people are more open to cross-cultural marriage than their parents. It is easy to understand this. The older generation usually sticks to their own beliefs. It’s hard for them to accept people from other cultures as their family. Besides, they may feel uncomfortable communicating with people who have totally different backgrounds. There are many living cases to prove this. A Venezuelan girl married an Indian boy in the U.S. but they met some opposition from their parents (Bahrampour, 2010). Their families didn’t agree with their marriage until they became familiar with the other culture. Noor is a Bengali girl who fell in love with an American boy (Noor, 2015). But her parents didn’t support this relationship at first because that they were afraid Noor would abandon her belief.

Is it easier for children raised in cross-cultral families to fall in love with people from different cultural background? Idamakanti reported a story of a bi-racial girl whose mother was a Puerto Rican while her father was a white man (Idamakanti, 2016). The girl found herself tending to fall in love with other ethnic men when she was 17. Finally she married an Indian guy and enjoyed her happy marriage.

True love may not have limitations, but there are some difficulties that intercultural marriages suffer more than single-cultural ones. The most challenging one would be core value conflict. Different cultures have different identity and values. This leads to different ways to look at problems. Intercultural couples have to make compromises in their marriage to accord with their spouses’ viewpoint (Adams, 2010). Another significant challenge is religious conflict. Damona, who is a dating coach, believes it is very tough to conquer the differences, especially for people in the modern age (Damona, 2013). Pathak faces a similar problem. He is a Hindu but his wife is a Christian. Their marriage is judged from both religious sides, which makes them frustrated (Pathak, 2010). Besides, languages, communication, and food choice can also be challenges in post intercultural marriage life (Glee, 2016).

To overcome these difficulties, someone has to give up something for their true love. The most common one is to move to another place. Here are two examples. Katja, who comes from Holland, married an American boy named Bob (Anderson, 2015). They met in Europe but then Bob came back to America. Later, Katja came to America and gave up her life in Holland to marry Bob. Elizabeth has a similar story (Kim Lawler Creative, 2013). She is an American and her husband is a Lebanese man. Elizabeth gave up her American life and followed Lebanese culture in their post marriage life. What’s more, sometimes people have to give up their religion beliefs or food preference or their jobs for their intercultural love.

On the other hand, cross-cultural marriage can have some advantages over the single-cultural marriage. Each culture has its own feature. This indicates that living with a person who comes from a different culture is beneficial to developing dialectical thinking. Arguments can be opportunities for learning. Crabtree believes that intercultural marriage can help couples to be more intellectual and inclusive (Crabtree, 2015). O’Neill’s marriage is good evidence (O’Neill, 2015). She is an American and her husband comes from Ireland. Based on her own experience, she thinks that different cultural backgrounds can help extend the insight for cross-cultural couples.

Hypotheses

Based on the materials we have collected and read, we can make some hypotheses about Texas Tech University people’s experiences or opinions of intercultural marriage as below:

1. More than 1 in 12 Texas Tech people have or ever had an experience with intercultural relationships.
2. There exists different rates of acceptance between different generations in Texas Tech University too. Younger people will be much more optimistic and open to intercultural marriages than their parents.
3. People who grow up in intercultural marriage families will be more accepting and more supportive of intercultural marriages.
4.  Based on our reading, we learned that it requires more efforts to maintain intercultural marriages and we are interested what Texas Tech University people think are the most difficult aspects of intercultural marriage.
5. We are wondering what percentage of the TTU people will make some sacrifices for their cross-cultural relationship.
6. The experienced people will know that more sacrifice is necessary and will be more willing to sacrifice for love than the inexperienced ones.

We were interested in doing the a research to find out what Texas Tech University people’s attitude on cross-cultural marriage was and based on our analysis, had confidence that the results of our study on Texas Tech University campus would be consistent with our hypotheses.

Method

To figure out what Texas Tech University people’s attitudes on cross-cultural marriage were and whether our hypotheses were consistent with the facts, we carried out a survey research in April 2016.

The survey had 32 questions in total. In our class, we were divided into two groups by personal choice. One group was more interested in the usage of cellphones in people’s daily lives. The topic of the other group, on which this report focused, was the TTU people’s opinions and experiences of cross-cultural marriage. Therefore, the survey contained two parts – cellphones and intercultural marriage. The questionnaires were divided into 3 sections. The first 5 questions were to obtain some basic information of the participants, including their gender, marital status, age, hometown and major. This information could help us know more about the informants and was quite useful and important. The second section, namely questions 6 to question 20, were used for the cellphone study. Questions 21 to 32 were designed for intercultural marriage. In question 21, we asked if they had any experience of intercultural relationships or had grown up in a cross-cultural family. Questions 22 to 24 were designed to figure out whether they and their parents would support intercultural marriages and whether they had different attitudes about cross-cultural marriage from their parents. Question 25 asked whether they thought intercultural marriage was good for society, to get a better idea of people’s attitudes toward intercultural marriages. We also asked what they thought the difficult aspects were and what kinds of things could cause arguments in intercultural marriages in question 26 and question 27. Respondents could choose from food, religion, language differences, traditions, and ways of communicating and so on. Since difficulties were observed in intercultural marriages, some sacrifices seemed necessary to maintain intercultural marriage lives. Therefore, in question 28, we asked whether they were willing to make some sacrifices and what kind of sacrifices those would be. Question 29 asked what they thought the benefits an intercultural relationship might bring to the couple were. They were asked how they would characterize children of intercultural marriages in question 30, and the choices could be positive or negative. In questions 31 and 32, people were asked how they felt about pastoral counseling for intercultural couples, and if the experienced people would have an intercultural relationship again, separately. Questions 26 to 31 were multiple choice and respondents could check as many as applied.

Before collecting data, we made an agreement of where and who was going to take this survey. Since our research was focused on TTU people’s attitude and behavior, the surveys were carried out mainly on the TTU campus or other places in Lubbock. Our research group included students in this class, visiting scholars, teaching assistants and Mr. Leverett, the professor. Each of us were going to get at least thirteen surveys filled out. Among these thirteen, six should be filled out by American males and six by American females. The remaining one was filled out by ourselves. Some of us collected more than thirteen, among which some international informants were involved. We also agreed that all the participants should be no younger than 16, so that our survey could be more clearly aimed. Other than the traditional way of giving out paper surveys, we also made an online version of our survey. The online version had exactly the same questions as the paper edition, and people could get access to our surveys and filled them out by clicking on our link. The link was https://surveyplanet.com/56fadb7a493d480c1bf15b08.

After the surveys were collected, we put all of them online, using a website called Survey Planet (https://surveyplanet.com) to generate statistical graphs. We analyzed the data by looking further at some questions or respondents and used Survey Planet to calculate.

Results

We did the data analysis based on our paper and online version survey. In total, 229 valid surveys were collected; among them 105 (45.9%) were filled out by males while 124 (54.1%) were filled out by females (Figure 1, Appendix B). Since our surveys were mostly carried out on the TTU campus, the majority of our respondents were young people. More than half of the respondents were eighteen to twenty-two years old; they made up to 52.8% of all respondents, while 27.1% were twenty-three to twenty-seven years old (Figure 2, Appendix B). 84.2% of the respondents were from the USA, while 15.8% were international respondents. Their marital statuses were pretty diverse. Among all the respondents, 55.0% were single, 24.9% were in committed relationships, 18.8% had already been married and only 1.3% were divorced (Figure 3, Appendix B).

We believed that more than 1 in 12 (8.3%) Texas Tech people would have or ever have an experience with intercultural relationships. In fact, we found that the intercultural relationship percentage was much higher than 8.3% at TTU. Among the 229 respondents, 46 (20.1%) had been in a cross-cultural relationship, while 21 (9.2%) were still in one now (Figure 4, Appendix B). That is, 67 out of 229 people in Texas Tech had intercultural relationship experiences. This made up to 29.3% of all respondents, which was kind of a surprising result to us.

Based on our reading, we made a hypothesis that there existed different percentages of acceptance between different generations in Texas Tech University, and younger people would be more open to intercultural marriages. We found that our data supported our hypothesis and younger people did have more open and supportive attitudes toward intercultural marriages. 50.2% of the respondents answered that their parents would support their intercultural marriages, while 72.9% of the respondents said they would support their children’s ones. Half (50.2%) of the respondents felt they were more supportive of intercultural marriage than their parents, while only 7 (3.1%) people said they were less supportive (Figure 5, Appendix B). These data did support our hypothesis pretty well. We were curious about these 7 respondents’ characteristics and why they were less tolerant of intercultural marriage, so we took a further look at them. Among these 7 people, 3 were male and 4 were female. We also found that 6 of them were either married or in a committed relationship.

We believed that people who grew up in intercultural marriage families would be more accepting of intercultural marriages. In fact, this hypothesis turned out to be confirmed by our data. In our study, 10 out of 229 (4.4%) respondents grew up in intercultural marriage families. Among these 10 people, 8 (80.0%) agreed that intercultural marriage is good for society and one thought it didn’t make a difference. Our general data, which included 229 respondents, showed that 54.1% of our respondents thought intercultural marriage was good for society, while 43.7% thought it didn’t make a difference. Besides, when asked if they would support their children’s intercultural marriage, 9 (90.0%) people out of 10 who grew up in intercultural marriages answered yes. This percentage is much higher compared with that of the general population, which was 72.9%.

From our reading, we learned that there were many difficult aspects in intercultural marriages. Therefore, we were wondering what Texas Tech people thought were the most difficult things for people in cross-cultural marriages. Participants could make multiple choices to answer this question. In fact, we found that religious differences could be the most troubling aspect in married lives. 61.1% of the participants chosen religion in this question. The language differences came in the second place. 37.6% of people regarded it as one the greatest difficulties in intercultural marriages. In contrast, only 6.6% of people thought food would cause a marriage crisis.

We were wondering what percentage of TTU people would make some sacrifices for their cross-cultural relationship. We found that most people were aware that sacrifices were necessary in an intercultural marriage and they were willing to sacrifice something for their love. Only 21 out of 229 (9.2%) respondents said they would sacrifice nothing. When asked what they would be willing to sacrifice to maintain an intercultural marriage, people had different responses. 59.4% of respondents said they would give up some food preferences and 49.8% were willing to move to another place for love. 25.8% of people would sacrifice their best jobs. And 16.6% answered they would sacrifice anything for love.

We believed that the experienced people would be more willing to sacrifice for love than the inexperienced ones. This hypothesis was supported and confirmed by our data. We found that the proportion of people who were willing to make sacrifices was much higher in the experienced people compared with the whole population. The experienced people include people who are in or ever had been in an intercultural relationship, which were 67 respondents in our study. Among these 67 people, 64 (95.5%) answered they would sacrifice something, including food preferences, jobs, residence and so on. Only 3 people, which was 4.5%, said they would sacrifice nothing. The percentage was 11.1% for inexperienced people.

Our analysis showed that all of our hypotheses were consistent with the facts, which means that our hypotheses on TTU people’s experiences or opinions on intercultural marriage can be regarded as reasonable. Based on our study, we could easily get a conclusion that TTU people were open to and supportive of intercultural marriages/relationships, and they had good understandings of the beneficial and difficult aspects of it.

Discussion

The focus of this study was to figure out Texas Tech people’s opinions and experiences of intercultural marriages. Based on our survey conducted on the Texas Tech campus, and our data analysis, we found some interesting results, including how many people had intercultural relationship experience, if they were open to cross-cultural marriages or not, what they thought were the most difficult aspects in intercultural marriages, and what kinds of sacrifices they would make.

The proportion of Texas Tech people who had experienced intercultural relationships was one of the surprising results of this study. We believed that more than 8.3% people in Texas Tech University would be experienced, and our data showed that among all respondents, 20.1% had been in a cross-cultural relationship, while 9.2% were still in one. This was much more than we expected or what we learned from the previous readings. This may be because Texas has a larger population of people who have different cultural backgrounds, and is more culturally diverse than many other states in the U.S. The other reason may be that the proportion of intercultural relationships has been rising recently and the data presented by the reading is not valid these days. Therefore, our study is important by providing a more up-to-date and reliable intercultural marriage proportion in Texas.

We believed that there existed a difference between generations in Texas Tech, and the younger ones would be more supportive of intercultural marriages. Our data provides evidence for this statement. Only 3.1% of the young people regarded themselves as less supportive than their parents. When we took a further look at these respondents, we found that 6 out of 7 of these were married. Therefore, a reasonable explanation is that these people were influenced by their spouses, who were not open to intercultural marriages. Another possibility is that these people have conservative religious beliefs which are not supportive of intercultural marriages. Since more of the young respondents are supportive of intercultural marriages than their parents, we could make a prediction that cross-cultural marriages will be more and more accepted as the society develops.

Also, we found that people who grew up in intercultural marriage families would be more accepting of intercultural marriage, and the experienced people were more willing to sacrifice for their love in intercultural relationships. This is quite reasonable. Those people who have been there are more aware of the benefits and the difficulties in intercultural relationships, and they could understand that sacrifices are necessary to maintain their marriages.

However, there exists some limitations of this study. The most obvious one is that we only had 229 surveys collected, and this is a quite small proportion of the Texas Tech population. Therefore, the data analysis based on this study may not be a typical representation of all Texas Tech people. What’s more, the survey questions could have been designed in a better way. We handed out most of the surveys in a paper edition and then put them into an online version. For some of the questions, respondents couldn’t find a proper answer or didn’t know how to choose, so they just wrote N/A (not applicable) for those questions in the paper version. However, this caused a problem when we put the survey online. Our online edition didn’t have a skip option or NA option, which meant that we had to input something by ourselves. This caused unreliability for some of the data.

In further study, some developments could be done in several ways. First, the survey scale could be expanded. The more respondents there are, the more reliability the study has. Hence, if more Texas Tech people were involved in this study, we could be more confident in our research results. Second, the survey could be better designed and organized. We could add more possible options to answer the questions to get a more accurate idea of people’s opinions. The skip option is also necessary in the online version. Last but not least, we could analyze the data in more aspects and make full use of it. For example, we could seek connections between different questions and try to figure out the cause and effect.

Conclusion

In this study, we conducted a survey on Texas Tech University campus in April 2016 to find out what Texas Tech people’s attitudes on cross-cultural marriage was. We collected 229 surveys and analyzed the data using SurveyPlanet. In the survey, questions about people’s experience with intercultural relationships were asked, and we found that almost 30% of TTU people were experienced. We also found that younger people are more open to cross-cultural marriages than their parents and people who grew up in intercultural families were more supportive of this as well. We analyzed what people thought the most difficult aspects in intercultural marriages were and if they were willing to make some sacrifices. The results showed that the experienced respondents were more willing to give up something to maintain their intercultural relationships.

Appendix A

Survey link: http://esl5315academicwriting.blogspot.com/2016/03/final-draft-survey.html

Appendix B

Figure 1. Gender distribution of all respondents

Figure 2. Age distribution of all respondents

Figure 3. Marriage status distribution of all respondents

Figure 4. Experiences of intercultural relationships of all respondents

Figure 5. People’s attitude towards intercultural marriages compared with their parents

References

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