Page 145 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

In previous cross-sectional studies among sojourners, the use of CMC and SNS was positively associated with both perceived social support (Cemalcilar, 2008) and online social support (Hofhuis et al., 2018; Mikal & Grace, 2012). The direction of association in these studies was assumed to be unidirectional, in that SNS use predicts social support, consistent with the dominant theorizing in the field of cross-cultural and acculturation psychology (Berry, 2003, 2006; Ward et al., 2001). In Chapter 2 of this dissertation, the findings demonstrate that the short-term positive association between SNS interaction and social support was in the direction of perceived social support predicting SNS interaction, and not the other way around. Moreover, if long-term effects are to be considered, then the impact of SNS interaction on perceived social support is negative, inconsistent with the previous findings (Cemalcilar, 2008; Hofhuis et al., 2018; Mikal & Grace, 2012). The inconsistencies in the results of this dissertation and earlier studies merit further investigation. It is important to note though that the findings of this dissertation (Chapters 2 and 3) underscore the importance of incorporating the directionality of association and temporal lags if we are to understand the underlying processes of the association between social interactions, particularly SNS interaction, and adjustment.
Sociocultural adjustment does not predict homesickness. By accounting for the reciprocal associations between homesickness and sociocultural adjustment, we were able to test the assumptions of the Dual-Process Model of Homesickness (DPM-HS) proposed by Stroebe and colleagues (2015b) which hypothesizes that: 1) homesickness (home factor) is conceptually delineated from new place adjustment experiences (new place factor); and 2) homesickness and sociocultural adjustment have reciprocal effects. Previous theorizing on homesickness have confounded the conceptualization of homesickness as including both home and new place factors (Stroebe 2015a&b). Findings reported in Chapter 3 supported the prediction that homesickness had an effect on sociocultural adjustment in the short-term, but did not provide evidence for the possible impact of sociocultural adjustment on homesickness. Specifically, the results suggest that whenever sojourners feel homesick, they experienced greater difficulty in managing the challenges of daily life in the host country. However, poorer sociocultural adjustment does not necessarily make sojourners feel homesick. This dissertation is one of the first empirical studies that validated DPM-HS. On the one hand, the findings of this dissertation supported the argument that homesickness and adjustment are two separate constructs. However, we did not find support for the
General Discussion 143