Page 71 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

Sociocultural adjustment. A 15-item version of the Ward and Kennedy (1999) Sociocultural Adaptation Scale (SCAS-15) was used to assess sociocultural adjustment. The original SCAS consisted of 16 items but other versions had up to 40 items (Ward & Kennedy, 1999). For our study, we used the same 15 items previously employed in studies on computer-mediated communication use of international students (Cemalcilar, Falbo, & Stapleton, 2005). Participants rated the level of difficulty (1 = no difficulty; 5 = extreme difficulty) of various aspects of sociocultural experiences (e.g., “making friends”, “using the transportation system”, “dealing with the climate”; “expressing your ideas in the class”, “living away from family members”). To make interpretation easier, the scoring was reversed so that a higher score indicated better sociocultural adjustment. We averaged the scores to come up with an index of sociocultural adjustment (αt1 = .82; αt2 = .76; αt3 = .80).
Length of stay in the host country. We considered length of stay in the host country as a control variable. Based on previous studies, length of stay has been shown to be relevant in homesickness (Van Vliet, 2001) and sociocultural adjustment of international students (Smith & Khawaja, 2011; Ward et al., 2001; Zhang & Goodson, 2011). The participants were asked to indicate the length of time (in years and months) they have been in the host country as international students. We converted number of years to months to come up with a total of number of months as a measure for length of stay.
Results
Panel Attrition
There were no significant differences between the participants who were retained and those who dropped out after the first round of data collection in terms of age (Mretained = 25.88, SD = 4.84; Mdropped = 25.00, SD = 4.38; t(412) = 1.68, p =.093, Cohen’s d = 0.19) and gender (χ2(1, N = 414) = 0.42, p = .515, φ = .032). Those who were retained had significantly lower number of months of stay in the host country during T1 compared to those who dropped out (Mretained = 13.69, SD = 15.76; Mdropped = 19.17, SD = 20.18; t(204.36) = -2.80, p = 0.006, Cohen’s d = 0.30). It is likely that some of those who dropped out had already completed their study, which made them ineligible for the second and/or third round(s) of data collection. There were no significant differences on any of the main study variables. We also examined the pattern of missing data for the main variables using Little’s missing completely
SNS, Homesickness, and Adjustment 69