The Reconstruction of a Social Network Abroad. An Analysis of the Interaction Patterns of Erasmus Students

Abstract

Most studies of interaction patterns of international students focus on ‘degree mobility’ and flows from ‘non-Western’ towards ‘Western’ countries. Nevertheless, in Europe, the shorter alternative of ‘credit mobility’ is more prevalent. However, empirical evidence on social network formation within this specific group of international students remains limited. Therefore, in this article, we study the formation of interaction patterns of students who study for a delineated period in another European country, based on a research project conducted in Austria, Belgium, Italy, Norway, Poland and the UK. The results show that specific interaction patterns can be explained from a flow perspective. Moreover, our study shows that students’ networks abroad are already formed before actual departure. In addition, we provide empirical evidence that institutional as well as group practices encourage or impede interaction between exchange and local students. Two transversal dimensions are especially relevant in the explanation of how groups are formed abroad: language proficiency and shared social spaces.

Keywords:

• Credit mobility
• ERASMUS
• Exchange students
• Social interaction
• Europe

Notes

1. We acknowledge the controversy on the treatment of ordinal-scaled variables as interval data (e.g. Kampen and Swyngedouw 2000). Nevertheless, it has been shown that the Likert response format is only a problem if one analyses each individual item separately (Carifio and Perla 2007). In addition, the F-test shows to be very robust to violations of the interval data assumption and may be used to analyse even ordinal ‘Likert-data’ (Carifio and Perla 2007).