Page 153 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

& Khawaja, 2011; Zhang & Goodson, 2011), the dissertation did not capture the positive components of psychological wellbeing. Wang, Wei, and Chen (2015) highlighted the importance of going “beyond the pathological lens” to understand international students’ adjustment better (p. 275). Thus, I recommend that future studies include positive indicators of psychological adjustment such as happiness and life satisfaction. Indeed, it is not just the absence of negative indicators, but also the presence of positive indicators, which may serve as markers of optimal wellbeing (Fredrickson, 2001).
Another important consideration is to investigate actual enacted/received social support and explore the mechanisms of how it is linked with social interactions and adjustment. Findings based on studies on perceived social support cannot be generalized to enacted received social support (Barrera, 1986). Moreover, specific information on how enacted social support can benefit international sojourners can be helpful for support providers, particularly in designing institution-based support programs.
Methodological limitations
This dissertation made of use of self-selection and convenience sampling. In the recruitment of participants, two important selection criteria were that they identified as sojourners (e.g., international students, expatriates, or overseas workers), and that they were Facebook users. The operationalization of sojourner in this dissertation was consistent with the dominant theorizing and operationalization in the literature (Bierwiaczonek & Waldzus, 2016; Hofhuis et al., 2019; McNulty & Brewster, 2017). However, one limitation of this dissertation is that there was no measure provided to clarify the intention of sojourners to return home. Moreover, international sojourners who do not use Facebook were automatically excluded. This limited the generalizability of the results to other international sojourners who could be using other SNSs other than Facebook. The results of this study cannot be also generalized to other relevant communication platforms such as video-calling and instant messaging. Furthermore, the invitation for participation in the studies and all the surveys used were in English. Thus, only participants who understand English were included in the study. Future studies should look into the possibility of translating the various measures to include non- English speaking sojourners.
This dissertation is one of the few studies on sojourners’ adjustment that included a longitudinal design (Bierwiaczonek & Waldzus; 2016; Smith & Khawaja,
General Discussion 151