Page 58 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

(e.g., general Facebook use, public versus private communication on Facebook, host-country versus co-national host-country networks, country of origin, Facebook penetration rate and access, home-country visits, language competence, etc.). Future studies should account for these control variables to better capture the complexities of the patterns of SNS use and sojourners’ adjustment. Another limitation is the interval between each wave. It is possible that a three-month interval between waves is not enough or may even be too long to detect changes in FtF and Facebook interaction. Both more fine-grained and longer time-intervals in assessing developmental trajectories would be promising. This current study assessed directions of influence but did not conclusively establish causal effects (Finkel, 1995). We suggest for future research to validate our results not only using similar longitudinal designs, but also quasi-experiments and diary studies. We measured Facebook/FtF interactions in a broad manner by asking the participants to think of their “significant others (e.g., family and friends).” It was not possible to determine specifically who respondents were thinking of (family or friends); and if they were thinking of the same set of individuals across time points. Moreover, it was difficult to ascertain whether the participants were thinking of strong ties or weak ties (e.g., close friends or friends in general). We measured perceived social support because it is context sensitive (e.g., online and FtF, home- and host-country networks) and comparable across contexts (Trepte et al., 2015). However, SPS-10 was originally developed based on co-located network support. We suggest that future studies validate our findings using measures of perceived social support that were developed for both online and offline contexts. Moreover, the measurement of received support would be informative, especially in the development of support programs. We also recommend expanding the application of the models we tested on other forms of CMC. We acknowledge that our findings are limited to international students’ context. We recommend that future studies test the applicability of our assumptions and the generalizability of our findings in other populations that might be voluntarily or involuntarily displaced and far away from home (e.g., domestic student sojourners, expatriates, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers); as well as in the general population.
Conclusions
We found that FtF interaction with the host-country network had immediate positive impacts on international students’ perceived social support, which in turn, predicted lower depressive symptoms. Moreover, by perceiving more social
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