family back home while interacting with host country relations. Such interactions help sojourners to maintain the social support that they need to face the challenges coming along with the cross-cultural life. Applying social support coping theory as the theoretical lens, this study explored the role of emotional support, esteem support, network support, informational support and instrumental support on Facebook and Instagram, and examined their role on the psychological adjustment of sojourners in Taiwan. I tested whether the effects of Instagram and Facebook use on psychological adjustment may be mediated through the five dimensions of social support that sojourners perceive on both platforms, as well as the potential interaction effect of multicultural personality on these relationships. The findings argue that the impact of Facebook and Instagram on psychological adjustment differ according to the communication orientation — i.e., home country versus host country, and the social support dimensions that they afford.
5.1. Facebook vs. Instagram: communication orientation
Regarding their impact on psychological adjustment, the first difference between Facebook and Instagram lays in the distinction between home country and host country contacts on the platforms. As a matter of fact, the findings of this study suggest that when it comes to adjustment, the networks that sojourners communicated with using Instagram weight more than the frequency of which they used the app. Indeed, while the frequency of Instagram use was not related to psychological adjustment, communication with host country relations on Instagram was positively related to psychological adjustment. Furthermore, the use of Instagram to communicate with home country relations was found to be negatively correlated to psychological adjustment, which suggests that sojourners who use more Instagram to communicate with their friends and family back home tend to be less psychologically adjusted to Taiwan. This result agrees with the findings ofHofhuis and his colleagues (2019), which indicated that contact with home country relations through social media is positively related to both online social support and psychological alienation. In other words, they found that sojourners who were keener to use social media platforms to maintain communication with
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kins and family back home were the most likely to experience feelings of homesickness and loneliness. A study conducted by Hendrickson et al. (2011) found similar results. By viewing frequent pictures and messages from their friends and family back home, sojourners may experience increased levels of psychological alienation, which hinder psychological well-being. However, results showed that Facebook use, both in terms of frequency as well as host and home country communication, did not directly predict psychological adjustment. Future research should apply qualitative methods to explore the reasons behind such a difference between the effects of Facebook use and Instagram use on psychological adjustment.
5.2. Facebook vs. Instagram: social support dimensions
The second main contrast between Facebook and Instagram rests in the different dimensions of social support. As predicted, sojourners gained social support through interactions with their social networks on both Facebook and Instagram, but some differences emerged.
On Facebook, home country communication was found to predict all dimensions of social support on Facebook besides instrumental support. It is likely that the distance might make it difficult for the sojourners’ home country relations to provide them with tangible support, which can explain this result. I also found that the more time sojourners spent on Facebook talking with their home country relations network, the more they tended to perceive social support on this platform. Although participants reported experiencing emotional, esteem, network, and instrumental support via Facebook communication with host country relations, this was not a predictor of their psychological adjustment to Taiwan. Perceived informational support on Facebook, however, was found to predict psychological adjustment. Furthermore, the results indicated that perceived informational support on Facebook mediated the relationship between the frequency of Facebook use and psychological adjustment. This finding reinforces the idea that Facebook is a substantial information-gathering resource for sojourners. Indeed, previous research showed that sojourners used Facebook to search for
“survival information” (Aksoy, 2016), especially by interacting with other sojourners living in the same country. According to Sharma and Govindan (2016) sojourners tend to “gravitate towards others in similar life situations”, and since their original support network is not readily available to the host country, they turn to the most accessible virtual communities of sojourners, which happen to be reachable through Facebook.
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Regarding Instagram, the frequency of contacts with home country members through the image-based app was found to predict all dimensions of social support. Similar results were found for host country communication on Instagram, apart from instrumental support.
Instagram communication with host country relations related positively to all perceived social support dimensions on Instagram. Surprisingly, however, none of the five dimensions of social support on Instagram were found to mediate the relationship between the frequency of Instagram use and the psychological adjustment of sojourners.
5.3. Multicultural personality
The present study also explored the role of multicultural personality on psychological adjustment. Consistent with the existing literature (van Oudenhoven, and van der Zee, 2003), multicultural personality was found to predict psychological adjustment. The effects of the five individual traits composing the MPQ were further analyzed. The findings indicated that cultural empathy was the only predictor of psychological adjustment, which partially agrees with the findings of Su (2017). Future research should investigate the effects of Multicultural personality.
Furthermore, the indirect effect of Facebook use frequency on psychological adjustment through informational support was found to be moderated by multicultural personality. Indeed, the findings indicate that informational support mediated the effect of the frequency of Facebook use on psychological adjustment only when sojourners scored a low multicultural personality score. In other words, sojourners whose personality traits were least suitable to thrive in a foreign environment were most likely to rely on the information provided on Facebook, which helped their psychological adjustment to Taiwan. A possible explanation for this finding is that low-MPQ individuals adapt their adjustment strategy by making use of Facebook to look for informational support, thus compensating for what they are lacking in terms of cultural skills. As mentioned previously, the multicultural personality traits that were significantly influencing psychological adjustment were cultural empathy and emotional stability. Therefore, the sojourners totaling low-MPQ score include individuals who are prone to anxiety and who tend to have shortcomings regarding interpersonal interactions in a cross-cultural context. The findings suggest that this strategy is successful as it helps the psychological adjustment of such individuals. This completes the previous statement that Facebook has a crucial informational role for sojourners as it adds some insights into what category of sojourners it is particularly important for.
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5.4. Limitations and future research
This study encompasses some limitations. First, I believe that deeper insights into the different effects of Instagram and Facebook could be gathered if the data that I collected and analyzed was supplemented with qualitative methods.
Moreover, further precision in the measurements of social media use could have contributed in the obtention of more detailed results. For instance, the frequency of platform use of days per week could have been supplemented by hours per day, and other dimensions of adjustment (e.g. social adjustment, emotional adjustment) could have been examined alongside psychological adjustment.
Furthermore, the sample of this study included individuals who sojourned in Taiwan for studying purposes (international students) and for working purposes (expatriates). Whilst both groups hold strong similarities, previous studies have found that they differ on some aspects (Bierwiaczonek & Waldzus, 2016). As Hofhuis and colleagues (2019) put it, “expatriates are generally older, and more likely to sojourn with a spouse and/or children, whereas international students are more likely to be young, single, and generally sojourn for a shorter time”. Besides, the present study focuses on sojourners living in Taiwan only. Although the sample was composed of individuals from 62 different countries, existing literature suggest that the host country characteristics and the attitudes of its citizens toward foreigners may influence psychological adjustment (Bourhis et al., 1997; Navas, García María, Rojas, Pumares, &
Fernández, 2005). Hence, future research should replicate the examined relationships in different cross-cultural contexts in order to strengthen the reliance of the findings.
Finally, it is important to note that the data was collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the promptitude and effectiveness of its response to the pandemic, Taiwan was one of the only countries to not implement a lockdown and the first country to eradicate the Coronavirus on its territory. In comparison to many other countries where people were enduring the brutal consequences of the pandemic, life in Taiwan remained fairly normal. On one hand, foreigners might have felt particularly fortunate to live in Taiwan at that moment, which may have positively biased their self-reported psychological adjustment. On the other hand, the concern for friends and family back home could have triggered feelings of anxiety, which may have negatively impacted psychological adjustment.
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The present study extended the literature regarding social media use and cross-cultural adjustment by examining the role of the different dimensions of social support perceived on Facebook and Instagram on psychological adjustment of sojourners in Taiwan. Studying the social media use of sojourners is important for two reasons. First, the ever-growing international mobility makes expatriate communities increasingly common, and Taiwan is a prime example of this phenomenon. Secondly, sojourners encounter unique challenges that translate into specific social media usages. And despite the existing literature on the effects of social media use on the cross-cultural adjustment of expatriates and international students, studies investigating those effects across different platforms among remain scarce. Hence, this study followed the recommendation of Rains and Brunner (2015) to differentiate the effects of social media platforms. I compared the use of Facebook and Instagram usage in terms of frequency and communication orientation and investigated their impact on the psychological adjustment of sojourners in Taiwan. The results suggest that Instagram and Facebook differ in their ability to facilitate the psychological adjustment of sojourners. While the positive impact of Facebook use on psychological adjustment depends on the type of support that it provides (i.e., informational), the effects of Instagram use on psychological adjustment vary according to the groups that sojourners communicate with via this app (i.e. host country versus home country). Hence, this study contributes to fill in the gap in the literature regarding Instagram use in the context of expatriation and demonstrated that the imaged-based platform has a role to play in the well-being of sojourners.
This study may provide the academic community with insight regarding the different types of social support that are perceived by sojourners on Facebook and on Instagram during the adjustment process. I followed the suggestion of Krämer and colleagues (2014), that social support should not be studied as a unidimensional construct and applied the five dimensions of social support identified by Braithwaite and Waldron (1992). The findings of this study agree with the proposition that “some platforms may be better-suited than others for provision and accessing of specific types of support” (Hayes et al., 2016). In effect, the positive impact of Facebook use on psychological adjustment entirely depends on the informational support that it provides. Furthermore, this study highlighted the dimensions of social support that were