Page 146 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

reciprocal effects of homesickness and adjustment that DPM-HS predicted. Future studies accounting for these reciprocal relations are needed to test the robustness of the findings in Chapter 3.
A summary of the theoretical contributions
“Our understanding of the uses and effects of media and communication technology develop in a variety of disparate disciplines and subdisciplines that until now have often largely ignored each other, which also hampers integrative theory formation and testing.”
- Valkenburg et al., 2016, p. 3
Responding to the call above, this dissertation was guided by an integrative framework that put together relevant assumptions based on theorizing in several disciplines. This dissertation expanded the general framework of international sojourners’ adjustment based on earlier theorizing in the field of cross-cultural studies (Berry, 2003, 2006; Ward et al., 2001) by proposing a concurrent communication view in conceptualizing social interactions. In this model, recent developments in communication technology were accounted for. Based on current scholarship in media and communication studies, a concurrent communication model assumed a reinforcing perspective (as opposed to the displacement perspective) in the use of communication channels (Dienlin, Masur, & Trepte, 2017). It was predicted that international sojourners use face-to-face and SNS channels concomitantly (Dienlin et al., 2017; English, et al., 2017; Rui & Wang, 2015). This dissertation was able to provide an empirical evidence for the reinforcing perspective in the use of communication channels. The results in Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrated that face-to-face interaction with the host-country network was positively associated with SNS interaction with the host-country network. This implies that the use of one communication channel does not necessary displace another, and they might have differential impacts on outcomes despite concurrent use. This moves forward theorizing and research in sojourners’ adjustment which traditionally looked at the roles of communication channels using separate models.
Moreover, this dissertation incorporated and validated a transactional view of media effects (Slater, 2015; Valkenburg et al., 2016) by testing the reciprocal effects between social interactions and subjective outcomes (i.e., perceived social support and homesickness); as well as subjective outcomes and adjustment (i.e.,
144 Chapter 6