Research On Digital Family Relations Of Emerging Adults

In 2000,the concept of "emerging adulthood" was proposed by American scholars.As a product of western industrial society,it refers to the period from the age of 18 to the time before getting married.Previous studies have found that the biggest characteristic of the young people at this stage is the disconnection between physiological maturity and psychological maturity.In recent years,a growing number of studies have shown a similar phenomenon in China.Due to the cultural and social differences between China and the west,the western theories and findings of emerging adulthood may not be applicable to China.Therefore,we must carry out the research in the context of Chinese localization,especially the rich and colorful communication practices in Chinese families,so as to open up the research field of "emerging adulthood".The family has a key influence on the formation of emerging adult traits and is the incision of some emerging adult studies.As the advent of the digital age has a certain influence on the power relationship,parent-child relationship and gender relationship of the family,the family relationship in the digital age has become a research hotspot in recent years.Many studies focus on the family as a whole and discuss the use of digital media by children in different types of family relationships.Few of them subdivide into gender relationships within the family,and they ignore the in-depth discussion of specific digital interactions.Based on the above research gaps to be filled,this paper will take We Chat social interaction as the main analysis object with the help of gender perspective.Firstly,it will describe the overall situation of digital family from a macro and quantitative perspective with the help of gender perspective,and explore the influencing factors of digital family relationship in the emerging adults.Secondly,it explains the connotation of digital interaction behavior in the family from the micro and qualitative level,and then discusses the influence of digital media on the formation of Chinese emerging adult characteristics.In the first part of this paper,the questionnaire survey method was adopted.The recovered 776 parents questionnaires and 536 children questionnaires were matched by gender according though the family number.The questionnaires were divided into four groups: father & son,father & daughter,mother & son,and mother & daughter,respectively,for statistical analysis.The findings: first,the "hierarchical order" in digital families is the opposite of the traditional family,which is represented by the new order of "daughter > son > mother > father".Secondly,in terms of digital access,the four groups had significant differences in gender matching.Factors such as children’s digital access level,frequency of common activities at home,one-child status and parent-child intimacy had positive predictive effects on parents’ digital access level.In the aspect of digital usage,there are significant differences in the number of mastering functions,the degree of addiction,the frequency of We Chat communication and the frequency of article reposting among the four pairs of samples.It is interesting to note that compared We Chat communication frequency of obvious difference,We Chat Moments that a public platform of parent-child interaction in terms of frequency is roughly same(in addition to the mother-son pairs),and the frequency of children’s praises and comments to their parents’ We Chat Moments is even higher.In addition,children’s age,level of education,the concept of filial piety and face-to-face communication frequency and so on influence factors,respectively,the number of parents use level caused by the influence of different level.It is worth mentioning that in heterosexual matching,the more filial daughter,father’s use level is higher,but the more son filial piety,mother the use level of the lower instead;In the aspect of digital literacy,the difference of digital literacy between father and daughter is more obvious than other gender matching,and the only child becomes the key factor to predict the level of digital literacy of parents(except for the father&son matching).The second part of this paper uses autobiographical ethnography to analyze the self-report of 40 graduate students from the school of communication.The results show that the era of digital family in China has arrived,and the situation of "female scored higher than male" and "children scored higher than parents " in digital family is closely related to the offline family relationship.Digital family is a duplicate of offline family,but it also reconstructs the communication space and parent-child relationship of offline family.The influence of digital family on traditional family culture is reflected in the downward trend of family power,the consolidation of family roles,and the change of filial piety.This paper also found that the digital home shaped the characteristics of China’s emerging adulthood: on the one hand,performance for the digital home smoothing the children’s separation anxiety,in order to delay the process of independent of the emerging adulthood,on the other hand performance for children in digital home for the first time found that parents of powerlessness,emerging adulthood people made a family responsibility.The contradiction between these two aspects makes the transitional characteristics of Chinese emerging adult more obvious.According to the research background,this paper puts forward the characteristics of Chinese emerging adulthood,that is,facing family responsibility,getting rid of selfcentered mentality and having contradictory dependence on family,and summarizes the differences between Chinese and Western emerging adulthood from a macro perspective.