A Study On Acculturative Stress Of Indian International Students In China

In addition to confronting problems of adjustment to a new college life, students studying abroad have to accept a new set of social values. The process of struggling to adapt to a new socio-cultural environment produces acculturative stress in many areas and demands effective strategies for coping, which stands as a challenge for international students' acculturation, and a bigger one for international students' education and management in China. Moreover, Chinese rise in economy and culture witness the increasing number of international students, including international students from India, which presses it to be solved urgently. Therefore, the research to explore the acculturative stress and coping strategies, and conduct a correlative analysis from the cultural perspective would be a positive significance to improve universities' education and management for international students.Based on such claims, this research was designed to collect acculturative stress information from Indian international students in China and explore their acculturative stressors and coping strategies. Accordingly, the research questions were stated as follows:1) Are Indian international students experiencing acculturative stress to a certain extent in China?2) If they are, what are the acculturative stressors?3) How do the Indian international students cope with the acculturative stress?Two research designs were employed in the study: a quantitative design and aqualitative design. 57 Indian international students from Jiangsu University involved in the study. All participants have studied in China for more than three years (the period of schooling is five years). The questionnaire employed in the quantitative research is based on the Acculturative Stress Scale for International Students, which was designed by Sandhu and Asrabadi (1994) to test international students' acculturative stress. It consists of 30 items that are scored on a 5-point Likert-type scale. It is divided to seven subscales: perceived discrimination, homesickness, perceived hate, fear, stress due to change, guilt and miscellaneous. A seventh subscale is summed, but not analyzed and compared with the other six subscales. The reliability test in the study shows that Cronbach alpha of the scale is .851, which indicates a good reliability. The qualitative research employs a semi-structured interview to collect the data concerning the coping strategies the participants prefer to use, and 8 subjects are stratified-random sampled. Quantitative data was analyzed by a social statistics software of SPSS 15.0 and a data processing software of excel.The major findings are as follows:Firstly, according to ASSIS questionnaire, it can be seen that though the Indian international students have been living in China more than three years, over 70% of all participants reported high scores on the scale. It indicates that the Indian international students still experienced a certain level of acculturative stress. The results also provided evidence that acculturative stress is quite different among different groups of international students, in which the variable of gender showed the significant relation with the acculturative stress: the male's overall acculturative stress is significant higher than that of the female (p=.010, < .05)Secondly, according to ASSIS questionnaire, perceived discrimination from the surroundings is the top acculturative stressor, followed by homesickness, perceived hate and stress due to change. The Indian international students did not show any acculturative stress in regards to their security and feeling guilty for leaving family behind.Last, according to the interviews, it is concluded that coping strategies play a buffering role during their acculturative process. As the interviewees who reported being stressed performed more negative coping strategies to deal with stressful events, like avoidance, while the interviewees who reported low level of acculturative stress preferred more positive coping strategy, like acceptation.The research is of significance for international students' self-adjustment and better management for international students. The major implications for management are as follows: firstly, systematic post-arrival training for young international students should be conducted not only with the school orientation, but also with the contents of promoting knowledge of the school culture, social interaction with individuals from the host culture, and communication skills. Secondly, the international students' office is suggested to provide international students with more opportunities to befriend students from the China, for example, creating a platform to socialize with school unions.Present study is by no means perfect. The main limitation is that due to the limited condition, all the subjects are from Jiangsu University, and the number of subjects is not very large, so it might not ensure that the survey could represent the whole population of Indian international students in China.