UK international graduates in mass media and public perceptions: A comparative study of the UK, Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan

This study addressed the following questions:

• How the mass media shapes the public images of the UK international graduates (from master and doctoral programs) about their education and employment?
• How the general public perceive the UK international graduates especially about their education and employment issues?
• Similar research questions will focus on how students from Greater region perceive and evaluate such contrasting trends and contradicting phenomenon?

The research team adopted the big-data approach and the survey experiment method to conduct a comparative study in the UK, Hong Kong and mainland China.

• This project involvd web scraping and conducting text analysis of the news, commentaries, and reports about the UK international graduates. In addition, it compared the media discussions on graduates with international learning experience and graduates of local universities.
• It  identitified several mass media with largest popularity, including newspapers, magazines, and major websites. It extracted all the news articles, commentaries, and reports from the websites of these selected venues, as well as trace the online comments and feedbacks about the extracted news/commentaries/ reports.
• The big-data approach in the study enabled us to understand how the mass media shapes the public images of the UK international graduates.

The survey experiment method was adopted to investigate how people (the general public as well as employers, senior management of companies) perceive the UK international graduates based on the manipulation of different conditions/situations of the labour market, as well as information about the international graduates and local graduates.

The survey findings were reported through CGHE webinars and other international conferences. Findings and analysis of the project were published as working papers, journal articles and book chapters, as well as policy briefs.

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