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3. Method
3.1. Procedure
An online survey was conducted targeting the adult foreigners sojourning in Taiwan, which excludes tourists and includes any non-Taiwanese citizen above eighteen years old staying in Taiwan for studying or working. The questionnaire received 431 answers and a total of 426 responses were obtained after data-cleaning. The survey was sent through online spaces targeting foreigners based in Taiwan such as the expatriate-based forum Forumosa.tw and numerous Facebook groups. Three cash raffle prizes were offered as incentives for the participation in the study. For representativity concerns, the survey was shared on Facebook groups made for different Taiwanese cities and for different communities in terms of occupation (e.g. students, factory workers, teachers, families, etc.) and nationality or language spoken. For instance, some of the selected Facebook groups included:
− Foreigners society in Taiwan 臺灣外籍劇團
− Foreigners in Taipei&Taiwan/外國人在台北&台灣
− Foreigners in Taiwan jobs hunting / information sharing
− Foreigners in Taipei 外國人在台北
− Expats in Taiwan
− Taiwan Expats Association
− Foreign Expats in Taoyuan
− Foreigners in Taoyuan
− Taipei Information Exchange (台北資訊交流)
− Taipei 2020 I Exchange & International Students
− FSIT: Foreign Students in Taiwan
− Communauté française à Taiwan
− International students in Taiwan
− Taichung Language Exchange & Life skills sharing
− Taichung Info Exchange
− International students in Taiwan
− Kaohsiung Entrepreneurs
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− Taiwan factory workers/caregivers
− Taiwan Foreign Teachers Association
− Taipei Expats
− Les Francophones de Tainan et Kaohsiung
− Hsinchu English Teachers
− Foreign Actors/Comedians in Taiwan
This list is non-exhaustive.
3.2. Participants
Among the 426 respondents, 110 were language teachers, 125 were university students, 40 were university workers, 36 were unemployed, 16 were business owners, and the rest of the participants were working individuals, from art performers to caretakers and scholars. The average age of the participants was 32 years old, ranging from 19 to 70 years old. About half of the participants were male (50.7%) and the other 49.3 percent were female. Regarding the marital status, 199 of the respondents were single, 129 respondents were married, 84 respondents were in a relationship, 12 respondents were separated or divorced and 2 did not provide any information. The majority of the respondents lived in Taipei (44,4%), while the rest mostly lived in major cities of the west coast such as Taichung (12,7%), Kaohsiung (8,7%), Taoyuan (7.5%), and Hsinchu (6.3%). The 87 participants left lived with smaller cities alongside the east coast or around New Taipei City. The sample was constituted of sojourners from the United States (18.8%), from Indonesia (8%), from France (7.3%), from Canada (7%), from the Philippines (4,7%). The other 231 participants originated from 57 different countries.
3.3. Measurements
Demographics. Respondents had to mention their age, gender, nationality, occupation in Taiwan, as well as the length of their stay.
Instagram use and Facebook use: Facebook use and Instagram use will be measured by the SMactive and SMfreq indexes developed by Su (2017). The SMactive index is a yes-no item
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that determines whether the respondents have an account. The SMfreq index determines the frequency of the use of Facebook and Instagram in days per week.
Home/Host country communication: To measure the tendency of respondents to communicate with their home country relations and their host country relations on Facebook and Instagram, respondents had to indicate how often they communicate with their “family and friends back home” and their “friends and acquaintances based in Taiwan” for both platforms. The answer options included never, rarely, sometimes, and often.
Social support on Facebook and Instagram. The dimensions of social support perceived by sojourners on social media were measured through an altered version of the Online Social Support Scale (OSSS) developed by Nick et al. (2018). In the present study, the OSSS is adapted to be platform-specific, one scale for Facebook and another for Instagram. For instance, in the scale for Facebook the statement “Online, people provide me with helpful information” is replaced by “Facebook provides me helpful information”, and in the scale for Instagram the statement “Online, people help me with causes or events I think are important”
is replaced by “On Instagram, people help me with causes or events I think are important”. The scales for Facebook and Instagram are both composed of 25 items, 5 items for each subscale:
esteem support (Facebook α= .89; Instagram α= .91) emotional support (Facebook : α= .92;
Instagram : α= .94), informational support (Facebook α= .89; Instagram α= .93), instrumental support (Facebook α= .87; Instagram α= .92), and network support (Facebook α= .87;
Instagram α= .96). The respondents need to indicate their agreement with the statements on a scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree.
Psychological adjustment. Psychological adjustment was measured with the Brief Psychological Adaptation Scale (BPAS), also constructed by Deemes and Geeraert (2014).
Respondents had to indicate to what extent they agreed with the statements from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. This scale is composed of 8 items, some of which relate to positive feelings (e.g. “Excited about being in Taiwan”) and others to negative feelings (e.g.
“Lonely without your family and friends of your home country around you”). Negatively valanced items were inversely recoded in SPSS.
Multicultural Personality. Van der Zee and Van Oudenhoven (2013) developed a short form
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國立 政 治 大 學
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short form of the MPQ is composed of 40 items (α= .83) measuring five multicultural personality traits, namely cultural empathy, flexibility, social initiative, emotional stability, and open-mindedness. The items include statements such as “I have a feeling for what's appropriate in another culture” for cultural empathy, “I keep calm when things don't go well” for emotional stability, “I make contact easily” for social initiative, “I function best in a familiar setting” for flexibility, and “I seek people from different backgrounds” for open-mindedness. The respondents had to answer on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to
‘strongly agree’. Negatively valanced items were inversely recoded for analysis.
3.4. Pre-test
In order to test the questionnaire’s technical application and to ensure that all the questions were understandable and that the selected scales were reliable, a pre-test was implemented with Google Form and sent out through social media and snowball sampling. A total of 34 sojourners residing in Taiwan responded to the pre-test questionnaire and 32 answers were kept after data-cleaning. After filling out the questionnaire, respondents were asked a series of follow-up questions regarding the clarity of the items, the length of time to complete the survey, and the general functioning of the survey. The majority of respondents reported a completion time of about 10 minutes. Feedbacks were mostly positive, but several respondents found some MPQ questions to be redundant.
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