Page 116 - Movers, Shapers, and Everything in Between: Influencers of the International Student Experience

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Chapter 6
studying in the US, UK, and Australia, with Indian students exhibiting higher levels of satisfaction. The results confirmed the hypothesis and showed that Indian students have higher levels of satisfaction and integration than Chinese or South Korean students. The study then examined the effects of academic and social integration on international students’ satisfaction and hypothesized that both factors influence international students’ self-reported satisfaction and that higher levels of integration are associated with higher satisfaction, especially in the case of academic integration. Both of these hypotheses were confirmed.
Using these findings, the study examined the role of integration in mediating the relationship between nationality and satisfaction. The researchers hypothesized that integration partially explains the apparent relationship between nationality and satisfaction, with other unknown factors also playing a role. The results support this hypothesis and show that integration-particularly academic integration-plays a role in the relationship between nationality and satisfaction, but does not fully explain this relationship.
Taken together, these results underscore the complexity of the student experience. While the results show a significant relationship between nationality and satisfaction, the correlation is low, suggesting that a combination of other or additional factors likely plays a larger role.
The second research question of the study continues this approach and examines the role that student integration plays in explaining their self-reported satisfaction. Both academic and social integration were found to have an impact on international students’ satisfaction, with higher levels of integration leading to higher satisfaction. This relationship was particularly strong for academic integration. These findings add to existing research suggesting that international students face high pressure from friends and family back home, making academic success an important factor in their satisfaction with their studies (Chen, 1999; Mori, 2000; Wu & Hammond, 2011). International students are often accustomed to being academically successful (Wu, Garza, & Guzman, 2015), and may be surprised to find