What matters most: importance-performance matrix analysis of the factors influencing international postgraduate students’ psychological and sociocultural adaptations

Abstract

With the increase in international mobility in higher education especially in Asia, the issue of cross-cultural adaptation becomes paramount since international students try to overcome challenges and flourish psychologically and socioculturally in a new environment. Therefore, this study was conducted to identify the factors influencing international postgraduate students’ psychological and sociocultural adaptations in Malaysian public universities, an emerging education hub in the region. It also further examined importance-performance matrix analysis (IPMA) of the antecedents for psychological and sociocultural adaptations as the endogenous variables to provide managerial insights for the authorities in higher education. A quantitative research approach using questionnaire was applied to get response from randomly selected international postgraduate students (i.e. Master or PhD) from top five research universities in Malaysia. The findings revealed that among the identified factors in this study perceived stereotype image and adjustment attitude were significantly related to psychological and sociocultural adaptations of the international students in Malaysia. However, attachment attitude was not significantly associated with psychological and sociocultural adaptation; and English language proficiency was not related to psychological adaptation. Moreover, the results of IPMA in SmartPLS shed some light on perceived stereotype image and adjustment attitude as the factors with the highest priority with relatively lowest performance in relation with psychological and sociocultural adaptations. Based on the results, this study derives recommendations for education policymakers and academic administrators to ensure successful international postgraduate students’ cross-cultural adaptation.