Page 84 - Never Too Far Away? The Roles of Social Network Sites in Sojourners’ Adjustment

mentioned that there might be cultural differences with respect to the experience of homesickness.
As of yet, there are no established theoretical or empirical bases for the choice of the time lag. We recommend doing more longitudinal studies to establish the temporal factor to detect effects among the variables in the study. We also suggest daily diary studies for a more in-depth examination of the interplay of home- and host-country interactions. Additionally, although this current study assessed directions of influence, it did not conclusively establish causal effects (Finkel, 1995). Further investigations could help validate the causal assumptions included in this study.
The results of this study are also limited to Facebook and cannot be generalized to other relevant communication platforms such as video-calling and instant messaging. It would be useful to validate our findings in relation to other forms of computer-mediated communication. Finally, we recommend testing our models on other populations migrant populations (e.g., domestic sojourners, expatriates, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers). Some populations are at a higher risk and receive less institutional support compared to international students, such as undocumented immigrants and refugees.
Conclusions
In summary, international students experienced less homesickness when they interacted with the host-country network on Facebook, both in the short- and in the long-term. When they did feel homesick, they immediately turned to the host-country network on Facebook to seek solace. Furthermore, homesickness had an immediate negative impact on international students’ sociocultural adjustment. We did not find any support to the idea that sociocultural adjustment might cause homesickness. The findings of our current study extend current theorizing by providing further empirical support to relevant theories in the fields of communication and cross-cultural studies. First, we provided support for the sojourner’s adjustment models (e.g., Berry, 2006; Ward & Kennedy, 1999) as applied in the context of Facebook interactions. Moreover, our study provided additional evidence for important theoretical assumptions such as the transactional feature of media effects (Valkenburg et al. 2016), the Reinforcing Spirals Model (Slater, 2015), the two-process view of Facebook use (Sheldon et al., 2011), and the Dual Process Model of Homesickness (Stroebe et al., 2015b). Our findings present important implications on the value of Facebook use for international students. Facebook
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