Abstract
Living outside one’s home country may be stressful, and having strong social ties should help deal with this stress. However, social ties may be protective or harmful depending on whether the social group they evoke belongs to the host- or the home country context. The current study examines how social identification with different groups may either buffer or aggravate the negative effects of two stressors (perceived discrimination and symbolic threat) on sojourner adaptation. Two hundred and twenty international students sojourning in nine different countries responded to an online questionnaire. As expected, adaptation was negatively predicted by both stressors. Moreover, high identification with the group of international students attenuated the negative effects of perceived discrimination on psychological adaptation, while home country identification aggravated the negative effects of symbolic threat on sociocultural adaptation.
Highlights
Cross-cultural adaptation, often defined in terms of the amount of stress or degree of comfort associated with sojourning abroad (Bhaskar-Shrinivas at al., 2005), may be viewed as a process of coping with the stressors present in international transitions (Searle & Ward, 1990; Ward, Bochner, & Furnham, 2001; see Van der Zee & Van Oudenhoven, 2014)
High identification with the group of international students attenuated the negative effects of perceived discrimination on psychological adaptation, while home country identification aggravated the negative effects of symbolic threat on sociocultural adaptation
With the aim at clarifying the ambivalence of the role of identification in the adaptation context, the current study investigates the effects of two minority groups sojourners may potentially identify with: the co-national group, that is, the group related to the home context and the heritage culture and the international student group, which is related to the host country context but not the host country culture
Summary
Cross-cultural adaptation, often defined in terms of the amount of stress or degree of comfort associated with sojourning abroad (Bhaskar-Shrinivas at al., 2005), may be viewed as a process of coping with the stressors present in international transitions (Searle & Ward, 1990; Ward, Bochner, & Furnham, 2001; see Van der Zee & Van Oudenhoven, 2014). The literature distinguishes between socio-cultural (sojourner social functioning within the host culture) and psychological adaptation (sojourner well-being). After moving to a new country a sojourner interacts with locals, and this interaction often takes the form of intergroup contact in which the foreignness of the sojourner is salient. Such contact may be stressful, especially when it involves perceived discrimination. The discrepancy between the norms, values, or beliefs of one’s native culture and the host culture, is another potential social difficulty for sojourners (Stephan, Ybarra, & Bachman, 1999; Stephan & Stephan, 1996, 2000; Van der Zee & Van Oudenhoven, 2014). Given that most sojourners are exposed to the host culture on a daily basis, such symbolic threats may result in high levels of stress, translating into poor adaptation
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