Page 82 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

reciprocal effects of media use and its outcomes. In particular, this current study demonstrated that sojourners’ Facebook use with the host-country network and homesickness manifest a positive feedback loop – i.e., Facebook use with the host-country network lowered homesickness in the long- and short-term, and in turn, homesickness increased Facebook use with the host-country network in the short-term. This positive feedback loop is consistent with the two-process view proposed by Sheldon et al. (2011). Specifically, the two-process view explains how a particular social difficulty (e.g., homesickness) serves as a motivation for Facebook use, and how Facebook use, in turn, can alleviate the social difficulty. This current study provides an application of the two-process view in sojourn experiences.
Moreover, this study contributes to the body of literature on homesickness and adjustment by testing the assumptions of the Dual-Process Model of Homesickness (DPM-HS) proposed by Stroebe and colleagues (2015b) which hypothesizes that: 1) homesickness (home factor) is conceptually delineated from new place adjustment experiences (new place factor); and 2) homesickness and sociocultural adjustment have reciprocal effects. Previous theorizing on homesickness have confounded the conceptualization of homesickness as including both home and new place factors (Stroebe 2015a&b). This study attempted to validate the DPM-HS. On the one hand, the findings of this dissertation supported the argument that homesickness and adjustment are two separate constructs. However, we did not find support for the reciprocal effects of homesickness and adjustment that DPM-HS predicted. Our findings showed that that homesickness had an effect on sociocultural adjustment in the short-term, but did not provide evidence for the possible impact of sociocultural adjustment on homesickness. Future studies accounting for these reciprocal relations are needed to test the robustness of the current findings.
This study also contributes to society by providing sojourners and their support networks information that could help sojourners in their adjustment in the host-country. This study provides insights on the social factors that may help international students cope with homesickness. Such information could also be helpful for formal support providers (such as counselors, university international offices, embassies, etc.) in designing programs and services for sojourners to cope with homesickness and other sojourn-related adjustment difficulties. It is important to note that the models tested in this study could have predictive values that might be useful in anticipating possible extreme negative
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