Page 28 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

When it comes to SNS interactions, one important assumption of media use is that the effects are transactional (Slater, 2015; Valkenburg et al., 2016). This means that media use (e.g., SNS use) and its outcomes (e.g., subjective outcomes) have reciprocal causal relationships. These predictive paths imply that one process (e.g., media use) affects the other (e.g., outcome), which, in turn, affects the one in the beginning (e.g., media use). In this dissertation, I aim to test the transactional effects between social interactions and subjective outcomes (i.e., perceived social support and homesickness) using a longitudinal design (in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively). Figure 3 shows a concurrent communication model of sojourners’ adjustment accounting for transactional effects. The transactional effects are indicated by the reciprocal arrows between social interactions and subjective outcomes, and between subjective outcomes and adjustment.
Figure 3. A concurrent communication model of sojourners’ adjustment accounting for transactional effects.
Reciprocal Effects of Subjective Outcomes and Adjustment
As indicated in Figure 3, the reciprocal associations between perceived social support and psychological adjustment, as well as homesickness and sociocultural adjustment are also included in the model. Research on social support and depression provides evidence on their possible reciprocal associations (Burns, Deschênes, & Schmitz, 2015; Pettit, Roberts, Seeley, & Yaroslavsky, 2011). As for homesickness and sociocultural adjustment, Stroebe et al. (2015b) theorized that the two are parallel reactions to being in a new environment and they may trigger each other, “causing incremental difficulties” (p. 6).
This dissertation aims to contribute to existing literature by investigating the reciprocal causal associations of these sojourn-relevant subjective outcomes and adjustment. In Chapter 2, I examine the reciprocal causal effects between social
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