Exploring the Perceived Social Support (PSS) of ChatGPT among Female Migrants in the Gulf Countries: A Qualitative Analysis

Social support can positively affect individuals’ well-being, mental health, and perceived quality of life. When migrants leave their country of origin, they might lose their strong social networks and supporting ties. As reshaping social networks after migration might be challenging, this study aims to examine female migrants’ perceptions of ChatGPT’s potential to serve as a source of social support in four dimensions: emotional, instrumental, informational, and appraisal.

Employing a qualitative research method, we conducted online semi-structured interviews with 64 female migrants working in the Gulf countries for less than a year. We recruited 300 educated, working female migrants in the Gulf countries through LinkedIn. A total of 64 volunteers agreed to participate in the interviews. They were familiar with ChatGPT-3.5 and had used its free version to receive social support for at least two weeks before the interviews. We used a qualitative framework analysis to examine participants' perspectives, applying thematic coding to highlight important aspects of perceived social support. Two researchers independently coded the data to ensure the analysis was thorough, and peer debriefing was carried out to validate the results.

This study found that ChatGPT brings substantial promise as an emotional, instrumental, informative, and appraisal support source but suffers from some caveats. It was perceived to be able to provide emotional support well to instill trust and privacy, as well as comfort. It was highly beneficial for professional tasks, skill development, and rapid access to accurate information, instruments, and informational support. However, its responses often lacked real human warmth. The generic, robotic tone was devoid of authentic human interaction. Within the findings of this study, no explicit limitations were found in these areas. What ChatGPT brought to appraisal support was logical ‘feedback’; however, the provided feedback was very poor, failing to offer solid conclusions, and was devoid of the needed depth for deep, personalized reasoning. These findings underscore the necessity for future improvements in AI to conquer these flaws and improve its completeness and efficiency when offering help.

The study concluded that ChatGPT offered valuable emotional, instrumental, informational, and appraisal support for female migrants.