Page 131 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment
P. 131

                                Addressing the Research Question: A Recapitulation of the Key Findings
This dissertation set out to answer this overarching research question:
How and to what extent do SNS interactions relate to sojourners’ adjustment?
There were four empirical chapters presented in this dissertation to address the research question. The studies in these empirical chapters were conducted under two relational contexts: A broad relational context which tackled sojourners’ social interactions with significant others, such as family and friends (Chapters 2 and 3); and, a specific relational context which focused on sojourners’ romantic relationships (Chapters 4 and 5).
Part One: Broad Relational Context – Significant Others
In Chapters 2 and 3, the relational context of social interactions was sojourners’ significant others, such as family and friends, in the home- and the host-country. Using the general framework of sojourners’ adjustment as a baseline (Berry, 2003, 2006; Ward et al., 2001), I proposed and tested a concurrent communication model of sojourners’ adjustment. A concurrent communication model extends the general framework of sojourner’s adjustment by accounting for the assumption that sojourners use various communication channels (e.g., face-to-face and SNS) concomitantly to interact with significant others in the home- and the host- country (Dienlin, Masur, & Trepte, 2017; Rui & Wang, 2015). These concurrent social interactions are predicted to influence subjective outcomes, which, in turn, impact adjustment. This dissertation focused on two types of subjective outcomes, a positive subjective outcome (perceived social support in Chapter 2), and a negative subjective outcome (homesickness in Chapter 3), and their respective impact on psychological adjustment (Chapter 2), and sociocultural adjustment (Chapter 3). Moreover, Chapters 2 and 3 addressed questions on temporal lags (i.e., long-term and short-term effects) and reciprocal relations between social interactions and subjective outcomes (Meng, Martinez, Holmstrom, Chung, & Cox, 2017; Trepte & Scharkow, 2016; Slater, 2015; Valkenburg, Peter, & Walther, 2016); as well as between subjective outcomes and adjustment (Burns, Deschênes, & Schmitz, 2015; Meng et al., 2017; Pettit, Roberts, Seeley, & Yaroslavsky, 2011; Stroebe, Schut, & Nauta, 2015a&b; Trepte & Scharkow, 2016).
General Discussion 129
 



























































































   129   130   131   132   133