Communication of Kazakh Students in EMU with Families through SNS: Facebook and Alternatives

Social Network Sites (SNS) are a great technological achievement that has expanded the daily interaction of people and turned the world into one big virtual platform for communication. One of the biggest advantages is that SNS have reduced the distance between people who are located in different parts of the world. This technological progress can be especially beneficial for students who left their parents‟ home to continue studying at the university. The use of SNS among young generation started to attract attention of scholars all over the world. However, there is small number of research about SNS as one of the communication tools between adolescents and their parents, especially as far as Kazakhstan is concerned. Therefore, the present study tries to find out whether Kazakh students at the Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU) communicate or not with their families on SNS while they are studying abroad. By adopting the Uses and Gratifications and Communication Privacy Management perspectives as the theoretical foundation, this research seeks to provide a better and more comprehensive understanding of Kazakh parent/child relationships through SNS. For this study, an online survey was conducted among 115 Kazakh students at EMU. The data suggests that along with Facebook, Kazakh students use alternatives to SNS. Moreover, they prefer to divide and use different platforms to communicate with families and friends. Since respondents are studying abroad, they don‟t feel like family member violate their privacy on Facebook.