Page 41 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment
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                                International student sojourners are individuals who temporarily leave their home countries to pursue academic careers in another country. Aside from academic and psychological pressures commonly experienced by most students, international students might also experience adjustment difficulties while in the host-country (Ward, Bochner, & Furnham, 2001). Most of the time, student sojourners rely on their social network support to cope with these difficulties (Smith & Khawaja, 2011; Zhang & Goodson, 2011). Social network support comprises both home- and host-country networks. Home- country networks are less accessible than host-country networks via face-to-face (FtF) interaction. However, home and host-country networks are both accessible via computer-mediated communication (CMC) (Johnson, Haigh, Becker, Craig, & Wigley, 2008). One benefit of CMC use is the perceived availability of support when needed (Cemalcilar, 2008; Trepte & Scharkow, 2016).
Social network sites (SNSs) are a popular form of CMC (Hutt, 2017). What makes SNSs unique is that they combine many of the features of other forms of CMC: They enable both social (public) and interpersonal (private) interactions, and they can be used in a synchronous or asynchronous manner. Facebook is currently the most popular SNS and is widely used by students (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007; Hutt, 2017). Facebook enables users to build new and maintain old social support networks (Ellison et al., 2007). Moreover, Facebook and other SNSs “offer an environment with distinct opportunities for members to exchange various types of social support” (Meng, Martinez, Holmstrom, Chung, & Cox, 2017, p. 44). Given that international students have access to their home- and host- country networks using Facebook, and can also contact their host-country network via FtF interaction, we posed the following question: How do these various forms of interaction, in conjunction with one another, impact perceived social support, and consequently, psychological adjustment of international student sojourners? This study aimed to: (a) compare student sojourners’ social interactions (i.e., Facebook interaction with the home- and the host-country networks, as well as their FtF interaction with the host-country network) and their influence on perceived social support; and, subsequently, the impact of such support on psychological adjustment; (b) clarify the long-term and the short- term reciprocal associations; and (c) address the question of directionality of the associations between communication and perceived social support, as well as perceived social support and psychological adjustment, in order to improve causality inference (Meng et al., 2017).
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