Page 70 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

we contacted via email 350 participants (84.5%) from the first survey who indicated their willingness to participate in the succeeding surveys. There were 174 participants (n = 104, 59.8% women; n = 70, 40.2% men) who completed the survey, which comprised 49.7% of those who agreed for follow-up surveys. For the final data collection, we collected data from those who participated in the second round of data collection. Ninety-eight participants (n = 61, 62.2% women; n = 37, 37.8% men) answered the survey.
At Time 1, the average age of our participants was 25.21 (SD = 4.50), with a range of 16-49 years. They came from 76 home countries and studied in 32 host countries. The average number of months they had been in the host country was 18 months (SD = 19.35; range = 1 month to 8 years). Most of the participants were single (94.2%, n = 390). Many of the participants pursued their Master’s degree (55.8%, n = 231). The rest pursued a Bachelor’s degree (n = 97, 23.4%), Doctoral studies/PhD (n = 74, 17.9%), professional studies (e.g., Medicine, Law) (n = 10, 2.4%), and post-doc studies (n = 2, 0.5%).
Measures
This study was a part of a larger research that aimed to investigate the roles of communication in sojourners’ adjustment. Only the measures relevant in this paper are reported here.
Frequency of interactions with significant others. We measured each of the frequencies of interaction with the home- and the host-country networks via FtF and Facebook communication with the following instruction: “Please rate the frequency with which you interacted with (home/host-country) significant others (e.g., family and friends) (via Facebook/in person) in the past two weeks”. The items were rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = never; 5 = all of the time).
Homesickness. To assess homesickness, we used a single item similar to previous studies (English et al., 2017; Fisher & Hood, 1987). We asked the participants to indicate “To what extent are you currently experiencing homesickness” on a 4-point scale ranging from 1 = not homesick to 4 = very homesick (Fisher & Hood, 1987). This item was found to correlate highly with the total score of a 33-item homesickness scale (Archer et al., 1998) and the 20- item Utrecht Homesickness Scale (Stroebe, van Vliet, Hewstone, & Willis, 2002). In their systematic review, Stroebe et al. (2015a) noted that a single item about homesickness is likely to be valid and that “people are typically able to assess whether they suffer from it” (p.2).
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