9/9/2014 Supporting Students' Connectedness via Texting (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE.edu http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/supporting-students-connectedness-texting 1/8 Supporting Students' Connectedness via Texting by Dominic Mentor Published on Tuesday, March 29, 2011 0 Comments Key Takeaways Providing students with portable communities of support through mobile phone texting offers one way to give them a sense of social connectedness. Increasing a sense of social connectedness encourages healthier emotional well-being among students, reducing potential feelings of isolation from the campus community. Texting may help improve participation by and performance among students, although definitive proof will require a more rigorous examination of the actual effects on their performance and perceptions of emotional well-being. Informal feedback revealed that newly admitted graduate students at a college in New York City felt isolation in a new urban and study environment. To address this perception, I helped design and implement an event text-messaging service between 2008 and 2010 in an attempt to determine whether it could foster a greater sense of social connectedness. Social connectedness is a concept used by social theorists and psychologists to explain the occurrence, value, quantity, and regularity of exchanges we have with people in our social network of family, friends, and acquaintances. These connections can be fostered in the physical realm of life as well as in online and offline spaces. The notion of social connectedness has often been used to characterize degrees of interpersonal trust, attachment security, social competency, and a sense of belonging. 1 We chose to explore whether text messaging on a mobile device could encourage feelings of social connectedness — remotely — for two reasons: First, text messaging has become the preferred mode for communicating remotely in the past several years. Second, text messaging allows users to reach out — discreetly — in a way not possible with voice calling. The texting service study provided useful insights into the processes associated with and manifestation of social connectedness. In sending campus and city event information regularly to students who signed up to receive event information, we were able to establish rapport with them in both the virtual and physical worlds. An analytical framework was then constructed to interpret the participants' texting practices. The study implemented both qualitative and descriptive statistical methods for data collection and analysis. The Study The data gathered from this ongoing study represent an aspect of my larger doctoral research project, conducted with the assistance of two coders and two others in my doctoral cohort.