Revisiones de estimación

The questionnaire survey served to build a profile of international students, including their perceptions of life at the university and in the city of Shanghai and their relationships with each other and local community members. The content of the questionnaire included questions about personal information;

measurements of involvement with three communities (housing, online, and ethnic), including frequency and evaluation of participation; items about friend networks; and scales to measure adjustment level.

2.2.1.1 Participants

The sample size for this study was 218¹⁵

15 The fieldwork was conducted by myself within 2 months in Shanghai, due to the time limit and resource constraint, the sample size of 218 is a limitation for this study. I have tried my best to increase

. I chose the sampling factors of gender, degree, and nationality in order to compare language students and

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degree students and majority and minority groups. The mean age of the respondents was 22, and more than half of the respondents were women.

Nearly half of the students had been enrolled at the university for less than 1 year, and 22.4% had been at the university for more than 3 years.

About two thirds of the students were enrolled in degree programs, and 30%

were in language programs. In terms of nationality, the largest group of international students was from Korea, followed by Japan and the United States. The distribution of participants’ nationalities was comparable to the distribution of the population of international students at the university.

Factor Gender Degree¹⁶ Nationality

Category Male Female Language student

I collected data from current full-time international students at Fudan University and distributed 350 copies of the questionnaire. I located international students outside classrooms, libraries, dormitories, and hostels and through networks of local students and international students. Students indicated whether they preferred to receive the survey in hardcopy or e-mail form. I delivered 250 copies in person and e-mailed 100 copies to the e-mail addresses I obtained from international students. Among the 218 copies returned, 48 were electronic and 170 were hardcopy. Therefore, the face-to-face response rate was 68%, and the e-mail response rate was 48%.

the sample size in order to conduct more types of analysis.

16 The missing data falls into other non-degree students group (i.e. exchange students). They will be included in other analysis except for the analysis of the group comparison between language students and degree students (Chapter 5).

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2.2.1.3 Measures

Items for the survey scales appear in Appendix A.

Language competence

I generated a self-perception of language competence scale using four 7-point subscales created to measure English competence (Clément, 1988). The four subscales related to four aspects of language: writing, comprehension, reading, and speaking. I also added the aspect of listening. The survey asked respondents to indicate to what extent they felt competent in each of the five aspects (1 = not at all and 7 = very). I tested the validity of the scale in terms of measuring competence in the Chinese language (Noels et al, 1996), which resulted in a Cronbach’s alpha of .95.

Satisfaction with amenities

I developed an eight-item scale to measure satisfaction with housing community amenities. Respondents rated each item on a 4-point Likert scale (1 = least satisfied and 4 = most satisfied). For this study, the scale had a Cronbach’s alpha of .77.

Friendly housing environment

Students’ perception of the friendliness of their housing environment was another aspect of the measurement of their feelings about their housing community. Respondents answered the nine-item scale using a 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree). The scale measured the friendliness of the housing environment in four aspects: racial tolerance, religious tolerance, academic supportiveness, and social supportiveness. For this study, Cronbach’s alpha was .71.

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Motive for online community participation

I constructed a scale to measure motivation for participating in an online community based on the Internet Motivation Scale (Wolfradt and Doll, 2001).

The scale consisted of 20 items that assessed three motives: information (α = .76), interpersonal communication (α = .76), and entertainment (α = .76). The items used a 4-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree and 4 = strongly agree).

Reasons for participating in home-country community

I assessed the importance of different reasons for international students’

involvement in their own ethnic/home-country community using a 14-item checklist. The checklist included three types of reasons: simulating one’s home experience, escaping from an unfamiliar reality, and expanding one’s social network. The respondents rated each item on a 4-point Likert scale (1 = not important and 4 = very important).

Companion checklist

I created the companion checklist for this study by expanding one from a former study (Bochner et al, 1977). The respondents indicated the type(s) of friends they preferred to perform each of 14 activities with (e.g., seeking help with an academic problem, going to a party, etc.).

Psychological adjustment

The Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (Zung, 1965) is the most frequently used because of its widely documented cross-cultural reliability and validity, which have been tested for international student groups (Ward & Kennedy,

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1999). Zung’s scale measures depression using affective, physiological, and psychological components (Becker, 1974) and consists of 20 items ranging from 1 = a little of time to 5 = most of the time. Ten of them items are scored in reverse, such as “Morning is when I feel the best.” In all, a higher score indicated lower levels of psychological adjustment. For this study, the scale had a Cronbach’s alpha of .80.

Social–cultural adjustment

The Social–Cultural Adaptation Scale (SCAS) developed by Ward and Kennedy measured social–cultural adjustment using 41 items (Ward &

Kennedy, 1994). Searle and Ward (1990) first developed the scale in a study of cross-cultural adjustment among Singaporean and Malaysian students in New Zealand. The SCAS uses self-reported ratings of everyday difficulties with cognition and communication experienced in a new cultural context.

Researchers have tested the scale for cross-cultural reliability and validity in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, China, the United States, and the United Kingdom, especially among international students. Several studies suggested revising the items according to the specific setting and case. The version used in this study was the most common one, with 28 items using a 5-point Likert scale (1 = no difficulty and 5 = extreme difficulty). The scale had high validity in this study (Cronbach’s alpha = .91).

The scale is a relative measurement in this study to derive the comparable adjustment among different groups of international students. Hence, the results are not intended to command any measurement about absolutely successful adjustment of a certain group of international students. In other words, it is not able to tell that beyond certain point, the adjustment is successful. The results

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can only show that the level of adjustment for a certain group is higher or lower than the other.