User:Wingcho/sandbox

My topic for the Wikipedia project is long-distance relationship (LDR). More specifically, I would like to write more about long-distance family relationship.

While having LDR with family, friends or intimate partner has become a prevalent phenomenon and more research studies have been conducted in this field, the findings are usually difficult to generalise. Therefore, I am curious whether there are any literature or systematic reviews published that explain and investigate this topic in a more comprehensive manner. More specifically, when people talk about LDR, we typically relate it to romantic relationship. Nevertheless, I believe family LDR is equally an interesting and important topic to be explored, which deserves more attention on Wikipedia. Therefore, my major plan for this project is to expand the sub-section about long-distance family relationship of the pre-existing page. If it is possible, I would also try to modify and diversify the existing content about intimate LDR to offer an exhaustive overview of this topic.

The content of “Long-distance relationship” on Wikipedia page has not been fully developed. There are mainly seven sections, including characteristics, LDR with friends and family, military LDR, statistics in the U.S., means of staying in contact, relationship maintenance behaviours, and research. Most of the sections mainly focus on talking about romantic LDR, while there is only one short section mentions about how friends and family deal with geographical separation. The military LDR section compares military and regular LDR couples. The report of the statistics of LDRs in the U.S. lacks credibility since the numbers are based on a survey conducted in 2005 from a non-peer-reviewed source (a website). The section that talks about the means of staying in contact emphasises the use of modern technology in LDR while the section for relationship maintenance behaviours explains more about the findings of sustaining intimate relationship from scientific papers. For the research section, the page briefly describes three research studies in the field.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-distance_relationship

As most of the sections talk about romantic LDR, I would like to diversify the content by expanding the family LDR section. I have done some preliminary research on this topic online and found several systematic reviews on long-distance family caregiving relationships. I believe this would be one of the possible aspects that I could work on the Wikipedia page. Besides, as I have realised, the sections about the means of staying in contact and relationship maintenance behaviours are inter-related to a certain extent. The page might be more organised if the two sections merge together, or if the means of staying in contact could be rearranged as a sub-section of relationship maintenance behaviours. The discussion of these two sections is still limited and under-developed. Therefore, I am also planning to write more on the factors contributing to the success or failure of LDR. Lastly, regarding the statistic of LDR in the U.S. on the page, I believe it is necessary to revise the data based on a more reliable source. I have tried to collect information and numbers of the prevalence of LDR. However, I still have not found any official survey or research on this topic. I will keep searching on other databases, hoping to modify this section as well.

LDRs with Friends and Family
Under the great influence of globalization, together with the advancement in transportation and communication technologies, migration has gradually become a feature of contemporary society. As a result, transnational families have become increasingly common in which family members live in different regions and countries, yet hold a sense of collective unity across national borders. For instance, children choose to leave home to study abroad, parents decide to leave home for better prospects and salaries, or siblings pursue different life paths around the world.

Sustaining Family Relationship
A qualitative study that conducted 50 interviews with adult migrant children in Australia and their parents in Italy, Ireland, and the Netherlands found that geographically separated family members generally exchanged all types of care and support that proximate families did, including financial, practical, personal, accommodation, and emotional or moral support. In particular, a closely related ethnographic analysis of 30 transnational families between grown-up migrant children living in Australia and their parents in Italy from the 1950s to 2000s illustrated that the exchange of emotional and moral support between parents and children was the fundamental factor for sustaining and staying committed to family relationships in transnational families. The prevalence of Internet technologies has facilitated remote family members’ emotional exchange, and provided them with the opportunity of accessible and affordable long-distance communication on a daily basis for sustaining relationships.

Cao (2013) conducted a series of interviews with 14 individuals who constantly communicated with family members living in different time zones, namely the UK, US, Canada, and China. Analysis revealed that among a variety of communication methods, including synchronous means such as telephone and Internet audio/video call (e.g., Skype) and asynchronous methods such as email or text messaging, remote family members relied heavily on synchronous methods for virtual contact. The real-time interactivity from synchronous communication provides a sense of presence, connectedness, and dedication between family members, which is regarded as an essential component of emotional support. However, it is worth noting that the Internet technologies have not replaced the use of older, less useful forms of communication, in which transnational families still use letters, cards, gifts, and photographs, etc. for showing their care and love.

Research has shown that people sustain close relationships using different communication patterns with different family members. While people usually communicate heavily with immediate family members such as parents or children, they tend to communicate less frequently and regularly with other family members including siblings across time zones. It is suggested that siblings feel less obligated to communicate dedicatedly with each other, especially for the younger generation, and they prefer ad hoc communication such as through instant messages to update each other’s status.

The effects of geographical separation on children’s well-being
Globally, there is still a considerable number of parents who have no choice but to leave their children for work outside their home country, fighting to provide their children with better future life chances. The impacts of parents’ migration for work on left-behind children’s growth are mixed, depending on various factors. The outcomes of transnational living arrangements on children’s well-being vary. For instance, through surveying a sample of 755 Mexican households with at least one family member who had migrated to the US, researchers reported that left-behind children might benefit economically from the remittances their parents sent home while suffering emotionally from long-term separation. Similar results were found by Lahaie, Hayes, Piper, and Heymann (2009), a correlational study investigating the relationship between parental migration and children’s mental health outcomes using a representative sample of transnational families in Mexico and the US.

In addition, whether the mother or father migrates for work also plays a role in this complex issue. Based on the interviews and observations with Filipina transnational families, children tended to experience more emotional problems from transnational motherhood than fatherhood, taking the traditional family gender roles into account. The impacts of parent migration on children’s psychological well-being are also distinctive in different countries. With reference to the data collected from the cross-sectional baseline study of Children Health and Migrant Parents in Southeast Asia (CHMPSEA), Graham and Jordan (2011) showed that children of migrant fathers in Indonesia and Thailand were more likely to suffer from poor psychological health when compared to children in non-migrant families, while the findings did not replicate in children from Philippine and Vietnam. Besides, special care arrangement for left-behind children, such as asking the extended family members for help to take on caregiving tasks, affects children’s growth substantially. Lahaie et al. (2009) revealed that children who took care of themselves had a higher probability to exhibit behavioral and academic problems when compared to other children with care arrangements. The feeling of being abandoned by parents is proposed to be one of the reasons that the children commit to undesirable behaviors such as quitting school or gang involvement as retaliation.