Page 47 - Movers, Shapers, and Everything in Between: Influencers of the International Student Experience

satisfaction and integration vary by nationality is not unexpected; it is therefore worth exploring why this is and what universities can do to address these differences. Previous research demonstrates that Indian international students have some of the highest satisfaction levels in the US among international students (Roy, Lu, & Loo, 2016), and that Asian international students have more difficulty in making friends in Western cultures (Smith & Khawaja, 2011; Han et al., 2013). Cultural differences may partly explain this finding: cultural similarity– dissimilarity impacts the sociocultural adaptation of students, with increases in interaction associated with decreased social difficulties, increased communication skills, and better adaptation to life abroad (Ward & Kennedy, 1993a; 1993b).
Likewise, contextual factors may also be at play: it’s not known, for example, what the proportion of Indian, Chinese, and South Korean students is at each university, which could have an impact on opportunities to interact with domestic students. It’s important to note, too, that international students cannot be stereotyped under one umbrella when it comes to their satisfaction and integration, as their social networks have been shown to be complex and difficult to categorize (Gomes et al., 2015). Social networks and the digital environment are important parts of international students’ lives, International students may have distinct social networks not determined by nationality, e.g. some Chinese students may have social networks composed mostly of other international students from their country, whereas other Chinese students may have social networks mainly composed of local students and international students from other countries. This makes identifying predictors of the student experience more complex than the measures of the ISB.
Compellingly, results indicate that integration partly explains the relationship between nationality and satisfaction, with other unknown factors also playing a role. While nationality alone explains only 1.5% of the variation in satisfaction, the model including integration explained more than 14% of the variation in satisfaction. This is a novel finding, as it suggests that a student’s level of integration is more predictive of
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The Role of Integration
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