Foreign Students and Media

Many studies show that adaptation to the host culture is challenging and stressful.

This adaptive process that induces stress is called acculturative stress. When foreign students

come to another country to study, they need not only adapt to the new culture but to the educational and social environment as well (Lee, 2004). “Language difficulties, financial

problems, adjusting to a new educational system, homesickness, adjusting to social customs and norms, and for some students, racial discrimination” are some of the issues foreign

students go through (Church, 1982, 544).

Similarly, Mori (2000) elaborated on the five sources of stress encountered by foreign students as linguistic, academic, interpersonal, financial, and intrapersonal problems.

Another scholarship adds psychosocial stressors due to unfamiliarity with new customs and social norms and changes in one’s support system, as caused by the process of acculturation

and adjustment (Lin, 1997).

When students fail to adapt to the new culture and environment, symptoms of

loneliness, depression, and physical ailments threaten and prevent the students from attaining their educational goal. However, students who manage to adjust well experienced less of these acculturative stress (Kline and Liu, 2005; Lin and Lai, 2011). Similarly, Hwang found out that social support and a supportive campus environment will significantly impact on

adjustment and learning performance of the foreign student, which consequently affects the student’s learning performance, and therefore achieving the learning goal (Hwang and Saing,

2011). More engagement, participation, and temporary integration into the host culture may

contribute to less psychological and sociocultural difficulty while abroad (Pedersen et al., 2011).

In her study of the mental health of Korean international students in America, Lee (2004) found out that social support moderated and buffered the effect of stress on mental health symptoms wherein students with high levels of social support were significantly less likely to report mental health symptoms with increasing levels of acculturative stress,

compared to students reporting low levels of social support (Lee, 2004).

The concept of “home” and various “spaces of belonging” is also at the core of a

transnational research. Basically, home is defined as where there is family, stability, continuity, familiarity, and security. At the center of the dialogue on home is media

consumption, wherein media acts as a linkage between what was left behind to what is now.

Various scholars have written on the media engagements of immigrants or temporary passengers who sojourn to another country for specific purposes. Kline and Liu (2005) explored the various media use and relational communication practices of foreign students as it relates to acculturation, stress, and family cohesion. In his analysis of the media patterns of

Chinese students in universities in the United States, he found out that family communication practices through media channels are related to students’ stress and acculturation levels.

Students who experience more stress tend to communicate more with their family members, emphasizing the importance of social support as a buffer against stress (Kline and Liu, 2005).

In another study on the media use of Chinese students in America, Yang (2004) found the different functions foreign students afford to television and internet. The study revealed that TV-watching is higher for US-based shows, however internet is used mostly for home-based sites. This differentiates an acculturation motive for TV-watching wherein the

students try to increase competence of the new language with a strong tendency to adjust to the environment where they are in, whereas the use of internet is to find what’s going on in

their home country, China (Cui et al., 2004). In another study, email and telephone were compared and were perceived to compete with each other on a variety of gratification

opportunities, as they were both seen to be cheap, fast, efficient, direct, and convenient (Kline and Liu, 2005).

Another way foreign students adapt to their new environment is by forming

friendships. Bochner et al. (1977) developed a functional model to describe the friendship formation of international students. They classified international students’ friendships into

three separate categories according to their functions: a co-national network whose function is to affirm and express the culture of origin; a network with host nationals, whose function is the instrumental facilitation of academic and professional aspirations; and a multi-national network whose main function is recreational. These networks all aim to enable the foreign student to adjust and lessen the acculturative stress (Bochner, 1977). Greater social ties of all

three types enabled better adaptation and lesser stress in the adjustment process (Kashima and Loh, 2006; Hendrickson et al., 2011).

Taking off from the suggestion of Hendrickson who did a study on the effects of varying friendship networks on international student satisfaction, contentment, home-sickness, and feelings of social connectedness, this present study sought to partly examine mediated friendships with individuals living in the host country with those living elsewhere

(Hendrickson et al., 2011).

Computer-mediated communication relates to offline face-to-face communication as it affects the adaptation process in the area of the person’s faith. In another study on culture

shock of overseas Carribean students in the United States, faith and spiritual backgrounds

were credited for shortened periods of culture shock (Joseph and Baker, 2012). Hsiao calls this the “processes of spirit”, or an inclusion of religious activities and assistance in the

analysis of service procedure for the international marketing of higher education (Hsiao, 2009).

Interaction patterns of foreign students have been the focus of much research.

Similarly, there has been extensive research into the learning styles, performance, adjustment patterns, proficiency, challenges, and expectations of foreign students. Nevertheless, little has been documented about their faith and religion and the processes involved as they meet their spiritual needs in a foreign country. This constraint has raised interest on what is actually

involved in the processes that these students undergo as they adapt a very sacrosanct realm of their lives into their host countries.

Although the fact that the online world can facilitate the religious communication of geographically-dispersed persons is unquestionable, but this literature has paid scant attention to computer-mediated communication as it relates directly to the user. This research therefore seeks to integrate and expand both literatures on church and media and the concept of home of foreigners by examining the usage of being in the online world by religious persons away from their homes and assessing the role of the internet in religiously-related communication

as it relates to enhance cross-border faith interactions among religious actors.