Analyzing the impacts of cultural backgrounds on migrants' acculturation strategies in mobile phone social networks

By employing a large-scale mobile phone dataset and constructing a social network with 6,351,033 nodes and 14,735,425 ties, this research empirically studies how the individualistic and collectivistic (I-C) cultural backgrounds of migrants influence their acculturation strategies under different contexts. We introduced the rice theory and developed new network-based constructs to measure their acculturation strategies, I-C cultural backgrounds, and socioeconomic status. We found that migrants with more collectivistic cultural backgrounds tend to interact more with people from their hometowns rather than locals of their host societies. Surprisingly, this relationship is contingent on cultural distance: when a migrant's cultural background is similar to the host society, this migrant tends to interact more with local friends than people from her hometown. Moreover, higher socioeconomic status is found to decrease the cultural conservatism tendencies of migrants with more collectivistic cultural backgrounds. These findings can help stakeholders to devise more refined policies to better integrate migrants with diverse backgrounds and reduce potential cultural conflicts.