This chapter reported the research methods that used in this study. It contains the research framework, research hypotheses, research procedure, and research method.
Research Framework
According to the purpose of this study, the researcher has adopted a quantitative approach for data collection. The research framework was based on the previous literature study, research questions, and the purpose of the study. The framework examined the relationship among psychological flexibility, self-efficacy, study abroad experience, and psychological well-being (Figure 3.1). As stated by the goal of this study, the research set psychological flexibility (X) as the independent variable and psychological well-being (Y) as the dependent variable.
Furthermore, the researcher analyzed the moderation effect of self-efficacy (M1) and study abroad experience (M2) to the relationship between psychological flexibility and psychological well-being. Moreover, this study due to sample’s study abroad length separated into two groups, one is individuals with over 8 months of study abroad experience (A group) and the other group with less than 8 months of study abroad experience, including no experience (B group). The study compared the two groups’ means in order to test which group with a higher level of psychological well-being. The detail of the research framework examined as below Figure 3.1.
Figure 3.1. Research framework
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Research Hypothesis
According to the research questions, the following hypotheses are generated to examine the relationship among psychological flexibility, self-efficacy, study abroad experience, and psychological well-being. Moreover, based on the last research question, this study aimed to investigate the influence of study abroad length. Hence, the hypotheses are formulated as follows:
H1: Psychological flexibility is positively related to psychological well-being.
H2: Self-efficacy has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between psychological flexibility and psychological well-being.
H3: Study abroad length has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between psychological flexibility and psychological well-being.
H4: The group with study abroad experience over 8 months has a higher level of psychological well-being than the group with study abroad experience under 8 months.
Research Procedure
There are 11 steps in the research procedure (Figure 3.2). In order to understand the relationship among psychological flexibility, self-efficacy, study abroad experience, and psychological well-being, the researcher examined the needs of this study. According to the needs, deeper literature study required to be reviewed. After the literature reviewed, the researcher finally set the main purposes of this paper. Following this step, with a profusion of the previous literature and data, the study formed its theoretical framework.
After the development of the framework and based on the previous study, the researcher selected relevant and valid instruments. The questionnaire was utilized in two languages:
English and Chinese. Therefore, the questionnaire was translated into Chinese. The translation process was first developed by the researcher and back-translated by two Taiwanese who have a good ability in English. As the translation process has been done, the questionnaire was reviewed by two peers and two experts. After peer review and expert review, the pilot test was conducted to ensure the validity and reliability of the instruments.
Finally, the final version of the questionnaire was used to collect the data. As the data was collected, the researcher runs the data through SPSS in order to develop the finding of this study. Based on the finding and result of the data, the researcher examined the limitations and suggestions for future studies.
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Figure 3.2. Research procedure
Data Collection
This research is conducting a quantitative approach. With the purpose of collecting data, this study compiles a questionnaire that includes elements of psychological flexibility, self-efficacy, study abroad length, and psychological well-being. As the target sample are using English and Chinese, the questionnaire is written into two languages. In addition, considering the sample is worldwide, the data collection process was conducted by the online questionnaire.
Needs identification
Literature review
Purpose of this study
Research framework development
Instrument of this study
Questionnarie revise and translation
Peer review and expert review
Pilot study and evaluate the validation
Data collection
Data analysis
Conclusion and suggestions
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In the pilot data collection, the researcher targets the groups who had went abroad and asked them to fill in the questionnaire. As a result of the collection, there are 35 responders in the pilot study.
After the validity check of the pilot study. The researcher officially targets the population of individuals who had studied abroad experience. The researcher targets her friends who were exchange students. The researcher not only asked them to answer the questionnaire but also asked them to find more ex-exchange students to fill in the questionnaire. In order to enhance the sample number, the researcher also targets the international exchange student Facebook group which can reach more samples worldwide. On the other hand, this study also targets some sample who haven’t gone abroad to study. The researcher targets her ex-colleagues and friends who didn’t have these experiences. In addition, she used snowball sampling and convenience sampling to ask them spreading out the questionnaire to gain more samples. As a result, the exact number of the sample is 256. In the total 256 responders, there are 220 with study abroad experience and 36 without study abroad experience.
Research Sample
The main purpose of this study is to understand the relationship among psychological flexibility, self-efficacy, study abroad experience, and psychological well-being, especially the research population is individuals who had study abroad experience. In order to reach this goal, the researcher is targeting the sample who have study abroad experiences. People with no study abroad experience will also be included as the control group. When considering to collect more data and to collect the data worldwide, English and Chinese are selected for the two main languages of the questionnaire.
With the intention of gathering data, the researcher used convenience sampling and snowball sampling to target more data. The researcher has enrolled in rotary youth exchange program seven years ago, therefore can serve as a good connection with Taiwanese and international exchange students. The research targets three main sources for sampling; the first resource is the population of Taiwanese who has been for an exchange student. Secondly, the sample is the exchange students that the researcher knew in her exchange year. She was exchanged to Germany in her exchange year, therefore, the targets are basically Europeans and Americans. The last target is the international exchange student group on Facebook that includes around 28,000 exchange students worldwide. As for the target without study abroad experiences, the researcher is also using convenience sampling and snowball sampling to target the researcher’s friends, family, and ex-colleagues.
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Research Instrument
According to the aim of this paper, the research instrument is developed by four elements:
demographics, psychological flexibility (AAQ-II), self-efficacy scale, and psychological well-being scale. The first section of the questionnaire is demographics. It requires the responder provides their demographic situation, such as their age, nationalities, and the experience of going abroad. Moreover, in this section, the researcher confirms their experiences of study abroad. For example, how long did you go to study abroad? In which continent you went to study abroad?
Psychological Flexibility
In this study, the researcher measured the individual’s psychological flexibility through the instrument Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II (AAQ-II) which examined by Bond et al. (2011). The AAQ-II is the measurement to test an individual’s psychological flexibility/
psychological inflexibility or experiential avoidance. In other words, AAQ-II examines the inflexibility dominance of an individual’s internal experience and the value-based action to environmental contingencies. Therefore, after the data was collected, the researcher does the reverse coding in order to measure the variable as psychological flexibility. The instrument is in a total of 7 items and its reliability presents .88. All items are rated on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = never true, 7 = always true). The sample questions for employee well-being are “My painful experiences and memories make it difficult for me to live a life that I would value.” and
“Emotions cause problems in my life”. The detail of AAQ-II was present as below Table 3.1.
Table 3.1.
Psychological Flexibility (AAQ-II)
Code Question item Cronbach’s
alpha α PF1 My painful experiences and memories make it difficult for me to live a
life that I would value.
.88 PF2 I’m afraid of my feelings.
PF3 I worry about not being able to control my worries and feelings.
PF4 My painful memories prevent me from having a fulfilling life.
PF5 Emotions cause problems in my life.
PF6 It seems like most people are handling their lives better than I am.
PF7 Worries get in the way of my success.
Note. Adapted from “Preliminary psychometric properties of the acceptance and action questionnaire-ii: A revised measure of psychological inflexibility and experiential avoidance.,” by F. W. Bond et al. 2011, Behavior Therapy, 42(4), 676-688.
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Self-Efficacy
For the purpose of this study, the researcher selects “New General Self-Efficacy Scale” as the instrument to measure self-efficacy. It is developed by Chen et al. (2001) and includes 8 items (Table 3.2). The Cronbach’s alpha for this instrument is .86 to .90. Different from the previous instrument, self-efficacy scale is rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree). Samples items are “When facing difficult tasks, I am certain that I will accomplish them” and “I am confident that I can perform effectively on many different tasks.”
Table 3.2.
Self-Efficacy
Code Question item Cronbach’s
alpha α SE1 I will be able to achieve most of the goals that I have set for myself. .86 to .90 SE2 When facing difficult tasks, I am certain that I will accomplish them.
SE3 In general, I think that I can obtain outcomes that are important to me.
SE4 I believe I can succeed at most any endeavor to which I set my mind.
SE5 I will be able to successfully overcome many challenges.
SE6 I am confident that I can perform effectively on many different tasks.
SE7 Compared to other people, I can do most tasks very well.
SE8 Even when things are tough, I can perform quite well.
Note. Adapted from “Validation of a new general self-efficacy scale,” by G. Chen, S. M.
Gully, & D. Eden. 2001, Organizational Research Methods, 4(1), 62-83.
Psychological Well-Being
The psychological well-being scale is adopted from Zheng et al. (2015). A total of 6 items consists of this scale and its reliability presents .88. All items are rated on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree). The sample questions for employee well-being are
“I am good at making flexible timetables for my work.” and “I generally feel good about myself, and I’m confident”. The items of psychological well-being were presented as below Table 3.3:
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Table 3.3.
Psychological Well-Being
Code Question item Cronbach’s
alpha α
PW1 I feel I have grown as a person. .88
PW2 I handle daily affairs well.
PW3 I generally feel good about myself, and I’m confident.
PW4 People think I am willing to give and to share my time with others.
PW5 I am good at making flexible timetables for my work.
PW6 I love having deep conversations with family and friends so that we can better understand each other.
Note. Adapted from “Employee well-being in organizations: Theoretical model, scale development, and cross-cultural validation,” by X. Zheng, W. Zhu, H. Zhao, & C. Zhang, 2015, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36(5), 621-644.
Control Variable
When discussing psychological well-being, there were several studies set working experience as the control variable. Is is because when individuals have working experience, there are more potential factors (e.g. tenure, organizational climate,and leadership) which inflence individuals’ psychological well-being (Wright & Cropanzano, 2000). Therefore, for the purpose of this study, the researcher set whether individuals has working experience as the control variable.
Instrument Validity
This study selected three instruments which presented a good result in their reliability.
However, the instrument was using in Chinese and English. Moreover, the population is different from the previous study. Therefore, in order to make the data collection process and result more consistent, there are some following steps need to be conducted. This process was done for the whole questionnaire, including demographics, psychological flexibility (AAQ-II), self-efficacy scale, and psychological well-being scale.
Consolidation and Revise
The first step of the process was to consolidate the three scales and the demographic part.
After the whole questionnaire is finished, the researcher discussed with her advisor and she revised some of the demographic details in order to make the questionnaire more comprehensive and relevant to this study.
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Translation and Back-Translation
According to the needs of this study, the questionnaire was developed into an English and Chinese version. The original scale was written in English, therefore the researcher had first translated it into Chinese version. The researcher comes from Taiwan and has Chinese as her mother language. After her translation, two Taiwanese who had over 800 Toeic score back-translated the questionnaire. Moreover, the selected translators are in human resource background.
Peer Review
Once, the questionnaire was translated into Chinese, the questionnaire proceeded to two peer review. The selected two peers were in human resource background and native Chinese speakers that had a high-level English ability. The reason why the researcher did this process was to gain more suggestions and feedbacks about the translation and the content. After peer review was done, the researcher analyzed the result and did some necessary reversion.
Expert Review
The next process was an expert review. In this step, the researcher contacted two professionals that had over 2 years working experiences and have good language ability in English and Chinese. The two experts had joined in Rotary youth exchange program for over six years, which handled numerous exchange students issues and cases. The questionnaire was sent in two languages by email. Through this step, the researcher hoped to obtain more professional and consist of an instrument from their experience.
Pilot Test
After peer review and expert reviewed, the researcher applied the questionnaire to do a pilot test. The researcher selected the population of ones who have gone abroad experiences.
And she conducted the pilot study through convenience sampling. The expected sample was 30 responses. As a result, this study collected 35 responders for doing the pilot study. The researcher did the reliability test through SPSS and check for the Cronbach’s alpha of each variable. In Table 3.4, all variables presented a good result. The Cronbach’s Alpha of all variables was ranged between .812 and .931. The result of the pilot test examined an acceptable outcome, hence, this study utilized the instrument directly to collect the data.
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Table 3.4.
Cronbach’s Alpha Analysis (N = 35)
Variables Number of items Cronbach's Alpha
Psychological Flexibility 7 .931
Self-Efficacy 8 .907
Psychological Well-Being 6 .812
Data Analysis
Based on the purpose of this study, the research was conducted by a quantitative approach.
As the researcher completes the data collection process, she analyzed the data through the latest version of SPSS 23. The following descriptions are the statistic method used in this study.
Descriptive Statistics
The purpose to use descriptive statistics is to present the general summary of the main data. This method calculates the numerical data into a more interpretable form and the content of this part include the means, standard deviation, and frequency.
Common Method Variance
According to this study, the questionnaire was conducted through an online survey. In this situation, there might be some bias when individuals filling the questionnaire. Common Method Variance (CMV) is the method to challenge the biases which may proceed from the different conditions, such as the survey instrument design, scale of the variables, survey format, the item’s context, and the length of survey instruments (Eichhorn, 2014).
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)
The Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was conducted to check the validity of the instrument model for each variable of this study. The CFA result was examined through AMOS in this study. There are three criteria to check the model validity, one is the factor loading of each item, second is whether the CFA model has a good model fit, and the last one is the number of model’s CR and AVE.
Correlation
When analyzing the relationship between the variables, the researcher use Pearson correlation analysis. It presents the strengths of the relationship between independent variable (X = psychological flexibility), dependent variable (Y = psychological well-being), and moderator (M1 = self-efficacy and M2 = study abroad experience). The relationship between
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study abroad length and psychological well-being was conducted in this part, too.
Linear and Hierarchical Regression Analysis
For the purpose of checking the hypothesis, the researcher conducted a regression analysis to test the relationship between the independent variable and dependent variable. Furthermore, the moderation effect was examined by the hierarchical regression analysis. Through the hierarchical regression analysis, the researcher can understand whether there is a moderation effect in the model. In addition, if there is a moderation effect, the result also shows out the effect’s direction (positive effect or negative effect).
Independent T-test
In order to compare two group’s mean in terms of psychological well-being, the researcher conducted independent T-test. Through the independent T-test, the result shows whether the two groups have a significant difference to the variable the study needs to compare. According to hypothesis 4, the study separates the sample into two groups, A group and B group. As conducting independent t-test, the researcher can compare the two groups’ psychological well-being level.
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