Page 32 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment
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                                OVERVIEW OF THIS DISSERTATION
The following chapters of this dissertation are four research papers that examine the roles of SNSs in two contexts: a broad relational context (Chapters 2 & 3), and a more specific context, romantic relationships (Chapter 4 & 5). To provide a summary of the various components and predictions of this present dissertation, I present a schematic overview of the dissertation structure (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Schematic overview of the dissertation structure
In Chapter 2, I aim to tackle the varying contributions of three types of interactions with family and friends (face-to-face interactions with the host-country network, SNS interactions with the host- and the home-country networks) on a positive subjective outcome (i.e., perceived social support), and, in turn, its impact on psychological adjustment of international students. This chapter also deals with the temporal lag and directionality issues by investigating the long-term and short-term reciprocal effects of the types of social interactions, perceived social support and psychological adjustment using a longitudinal panel survey design gathered online. Since previous studies used depression as a primary indicator of psychological adjustment (Ward et
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