Social Networks, Identity, and Access: Immigrants in Québec

The author looks at the relationship between immigrants' social network structures, their identities, language status, and trust, to determine if the type of social networks they have is related to information access, linguistic capital, social capital and opportunities for L2 communication. Her data was collected via an online survey provided in Spanish, English, Chinese and Arabic, sampling immigrants in Quebec who speak a language other than French as their first language. Data from the World Values Survey Wave 5 for Canada were used to compare findings from this study to determine if participants differ significantly on measures of trust, identity, social network structure, and level of social capital, and to make links between these indicators and the access they have to information about services for newcomers. The author's findings indicate that participants tended to have lower levels of social capital than Canadians from the World Values Survey of Canada. Most participants did not tend to identify as Canadian or Québécois regardless of citizenship or nationalization status. Participants with primarily bonding ties in their social networks had less access to federal and provincial sources of information and relied more on their social networks for information. Social networks were shown in the author's study to be related to the types of information participants were able to access. The author concludes that this may suggest the importance of social network mapping in determining how to disseminate information about services to immigrant communities.

Master's Thesis

McGill University

Montreal

2017

151p.

en