Page 156 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

The conceptualization and operationalization of the “new place” factor as proposed by the DPM-HS (Stroebe et al., 2015b) was limited to Ward et al.’s (2001) definition and operationalization of sociocultural adjustment. Although this measure of (sociocultural) adjustment is in the context of host-country experiences and covers several dimensions (e.g., cognition and communication, social and cultural relatedness, practical and environmental challenges) (Ward & Kennedy, 1999), future studies should explore other conceptualizations and measures of new-place related stressors to provide a holistic investigation of the model.
In most cases, I used previously validated scales in the various studies in this dissertation. However, due to the lack of existing measure, I constructed the Facebook relationship support scale (Chapter 5). Although I was able to establish that this measure has good reliability, and does not vary in terms of meaning between those in LDRR and GCRR using multigroup invariance analysis, it is still important to establish the scale’s psychometric properties in future studies.
This current dissertation focused on the individual level experience and between groups. Future studies should look at multiple levels of influence by employing within-person, dyadic level (e.g., looking at the interplay between romantic partners or friends), and social network level of analyses. We recommend for future research to validate our results using similar longitudinal designs with a much larger sample. We also suggest other methodologies such as daily diary studies, content analysis of SNS interactions, social network analysis, and qualitative studies to test the robustness of the results in this current dissertation, as well as provide a more comprehensive and in-depth account of international sojourners’ experiences.
Although the results of the current dissertation might be informative for different groups of migrants, it is important to acknowledge the variations in experiences that might limit generalization of the findings to all individuals who are away from home. We recommend testing our models on other populations who might be temporarily or permanently living away from their home country (e.g., domestic sojourners, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers). This might prove to be useful to some populations who are at a higher risk, and receive less institutional support (e.g., undocumented immigrants and refugees) compared to international students and expatriates. I hope that this dissertation can stimulate further questions and investigations to better capture the complexities of the roles of communication in sojourners’ adjustment. Ultimately, it is my hope that the findings in this dissertation are helpful to the numerous individuals who might be voluntarily or involuntarily displaced and far away from home.
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