Page 46 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

useful in establishing the temporal order (Meng et al., 2017). It also allows the investigation of the short- and long-term reciprocal associations between communication and perceived social support, as well as between perceived social support and depressive symptoms.
Method
Participants were international students who answered our online survey on Qualtrics. The survey questionnaire was in English. We collected data on three time points (T1, T2, T3), with an interval of three months between data collections. For the first survey (T1), we recruited participants on Facebook by posting an announcement about the study on various international student group Facebook pages (e.g., Erasmus Student Network). The announcement was also shared on Facebook by a few university-based international students’ offices and international student organizations (e.g., VU Amsterdam International Office, International Students Lund University, etc.). Participation was entirely voluntary. As a form of compensation, the participants had the option to join a raffle draw at each time point, where 10 participants were randomly selected to each receive a €50 euro gift voucher. A total of 414 participants (n = 246, 59.4% women, n = 168, 40.6% men) answered the first survey (T1). We asked in the first survey if they were willing to participate in second and third follow-up surveys and 350 (84.5%) participants agreed. For the second survey (T2), 174 completed the questionnaire (49.7% of those who agreed for follow-up surveys). For the third survey (T3), we sent the questionnaire to those who participated in T2. A total of 98 participants completed the questionnaire (56% of those who participated in T2). The mean age of participants at T1 was 25.21 (SD = 4.50), ranging from 16 to 49 years. They were from 76 different countries (43.4% from Europe, 27.6% from Asia, and the rest from South America, Africa, North America, and Australia), and studying in 32 host countries. The average length of stay in the host-country is 18 months (SD = 19.34). The demographic characteristics of the participants across the three time points are summarized in Table 1.
Participants and procedures
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