Page 55 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

it comes to disclosing stressful situations and seeking social support from the home-country network (Seo et al., 2016; Smith & Khawaja, 2011). It could be that the home-country network is seen as a less viable source of support because of physical separation (Mikal et al., 2013). Moreover, it is possible that international students keep their negative feelings and experiences secret from their home- country network to avoid burdening their family and friends with their problems, and avoid being perceived as a failure in managing emotional distress on their own (Seo et al., 2016; Smith & Khawaja, 2011). These results point to the crucial role of the host-country network in sojourners’ experiences since international students seem more likely to depend on this network for perceived social support. Future studies should also look into how Facebook interaction with the home- and the host-country networks relate to other forms of social support (e.g., received offline social support, SNS-based social support).
FtF versus Facebook interaction. FtF interaction with the host-country network increased perceived social support in the short-term, consistent with previous findings (Adelman, 1988; Hechanova-Alampay et al., 2002; Smith & Khawaja, 2011; Ward et al., 2001). However, there was no long-term impact of FtF interaction with the host-country network on perceived social support. Taken together, these results suggest that regular FtF interactions with the host network are important to sustain international students’ perceived social support. Meanwhile, we found that there was a significant negative influence of Facebook with the host- country network on perceived social support in the long-term. On one hand, this might imply that a high frequency of Facebook interaction with the host-country network detracts international students from “real life” interaction which are important in fostering support (Shakya & Christakis, 2016). On the other hand, it may not simply be the physical social isolation, because FtF interactions with the host-country network were frequent. It could also be that certain characteristics of the Facebook context itself contributed to lowered perceived social support over time. For example, certain social dynamics on Facebook could make students feel ignored, such as not getting the likes or comments they expected for their posts from friends in their host-country network. Note though that a previous study showed that social interactions on Facebook had no association with perceived social support (Li et al., 2015). Moreover, Utz and Breuer (2017) found that the number of strong ties on SNS was not related to social support. Thus, we propose that future studies test the robustness of our findings.
SNS, Support, and Depression 53