So what do students utilize cultural clubs for?
To understand people's attitudes towards cultural clubs, we asked how the absence of in-person activities OR the return of club activities has impacted their college experience. This question allowed us to analyze the responses from the framing of the preliminary work done in the literature review. The responses gave us an insight as to students' usage of the club from social aspects, academic advantages, wanting to connect to ‘home’ heritage’, and how that shows evidence of the process of acculturation. Table. 1 shows under what category we coded each response, based on the literature, and how future research can use this to analyze other responses in acculturation from cultural clubs.
Campus life, including student clubs, have been greatly impacted by the pandemic. How do you think the absence of in-person club activities OR the return of club activities in-person impacted your college experience?
Table 1. Coding for COVID Response and Cultural Clubs
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Code Example
Conclusion
Our data shows that students ultimately prioritize general social connections over the utilization of cultural clubs to meet specific social goals. Based on the coding of open-ended responses and our likert scale questions, we noticed that the majority of students who were registered in a cultural club wrote that they utilized or felt the impact of no in-person club activities through their lack of in-person social connections amidst a pandemic. We do not make any claims of direct causation because (1) we have limited data (i.e., lack of responses to our survey) and (2) because during the time of the survey we were under COVID restrictions. We consider, as a result of the pandemic, how many students have been home, naturally engaging with their ‘native’ household cultural heritage. It could be for this reason that students now, especially those that have not participated in activities outside the home since lock-down restrictions, prioritize social events, regardless of connection to culture. While this survey was conducted during a phase when covid restrictions were being lifted, it is still important to take into account that all data collected was influenced by Covid-19.
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Again, the virus has impacted social interactions and our data should be viewed solely within the context of the pandemic. It is possible that it diverges from data collected by similar pre-pandemic studies. A comparison inquiry along these lines would be an interesting project for the future. The reliability of our research is challenged by our small sample size, the limited time allotted to perform this study, and a lack of variety within the sample. While American University has over 50 cultural clubs, our results only reflect the participation of around 13 different cultural clubs. This opens up more potential avenues for further research; conducting a larger scale survey to test the reliability of the data collected by this study or expanding the sample to include a greater number of clubs and multiple universities. Additionally, further value could be explored by focusing more closely on how pandemic conditions developed existing theories on acculturation, assimilation, and in-group vs. out-group behavior.