Page 63 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

When international students leave their home country to pursue academic careers in another country, it is quite a common experience to miss family and friends, as well as long for the familiarity of home (Thurber & Walton, 2012; Vingerhoets, 2005). However, when feelings of unhappiness and misery are too intense, when there is a strong preoccupation with thoughts of home, and a deep sense of grief for the home, the individual could be suffering from homesickness (Furnham, 2005). Homesickness is often associated with host-country social contacts and interactions. Previous studies found that social interactions with the host-country network help international students deal with homesickness (Hannigan, 2005; Thurber & Walton, 2012). However, somewhat paradoxically, these social interactions could also intensify longing for home and family (Hannigan, 2005). The other direction has also been observed: Homesick individuals tend to avoid social interactions (Thurber & Walton, 2012). Thus, the directions of the associations of homesickness and social interactions are not clear in the research literature. Homesickness can either be a predictor or an outcome of social interactions (Thurber & Walton, 2005). This current study aimed to address the question of directionality and temporal precedence between social interactions and homesickness.
In investigating homesickness and social interactions, it may be important to distinguish among various types of social interactions with the home- and the host-country networks (English, Davis, Wei, & Gross, 2017). Aside from face-to-face (FtF) social interactions, social network sites (SNSs) have become a popular venue of interactions. SNSs such as Facebook have “partially moved the interactions people have from offline (i.e., “face-to-face”) to online contexts” (Verduyn, Ybarra, Resibois, Jonides, & Kross, 2017; p. 294). Facebook is currently the most popular social network site (Smith & Anderson, 2018). More crucially, it is widely used by students to build new networks and connect with their existing networks (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007). Thus, this study also aimed to extend current theorizing by examining the roles of various types of social interactions, including those facilitated by communication technologies (such as Facebook), in homesickness experiences (Stroebe, Schut, & Nauta, 2015a). We investigated the relative importance of FtF interactions with the host-country network and Facebook interactions with the host- and the home-country networks in homesickness experiences.
Aside from social interactions, homesickness is also linked to lower adjustment to the new situation in the host country (Stroebe et al., 2015a; Van
SNS, Homesickness, and Adjustment 61