Communication without borders : A quantitative study on how mobility and a cosmopolitan self-identity affect Swedish expatriates communication patterns with friends.

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study is to find out how Swedish voluntary migrants communicate with friends in three different groups: friends that resides in the same country as the respondent currently lives in, friends in Sweden, friends in other countries around the globe and whether or not individual mobility, demographic factors or a sense of global citizenship affect the chosen mean of communication. The reason behind the study is to introduce a previously unstudied area into the field of geographically based media studies and hopefully contribute to a deeper understanding of the role played by different means of communication in shaping the dynamics of global friendship. The theoretical approach in this study will be from three different outlooks, migration, polymedia (including the second-level digital divide) and cosmopolitanism. The study is based on data from the Institute for Society, Opinion and Media (SOM) and their survey questionnaire sent out to Swedish expatriates during fall 2014 / winter 2015, also known as Utlands-SOM. The total number of respondents are 2268. The study starts with basic frequencies to find out which media that are the most prominent, then binary logistic regressions have been made. The total number of dependent variables are 21 and these have then been analysed from seven independent variables; age, gender, education, travel patterns, years spent abroad, number of countries lived in and whether or not the respondent consider himself/herself being a cosmopolitan. This generates a total of seven tables (one for each media) with three models in each (contact with friends in current country of residency, contact with friends in Sweden and contact with friends in other parts of the world). Amongst Swedish expatriates, e-mail and Facebook are the two most popular media for keeping in touch with friends, regardless of the friends location. The most significant demographic variable is age. Usage of video call, text message, chat, Facebook and other social media tend to decrease with age. Every year spent abroad decreases the communication with friends in Sweden, but increases the communication in the current country of residency. The number of countries lived in have a positive effect on communication with friends in other parts of the world. Cosmopolitan self-identity is found to be most significant when communicating with friends in other parts of the world, and it also affects e-mail the most. Level of education, which in previous studies have been found closely linked to a cosmopolitan identity, is found to have no significant correlation. Arguably, this is explained by the other means of communications negative relationship with the variable.