A Research On Shanghai College Students And Employees' Social Distance Toward Foreigners Of Five Country Groups And Their Willingness To Provide Social Support In Foreigners' Acculturation In China

More and more people from all over the world are attracted to come to China forsightseeing, study, and work or for other exchanges. Understanding of the Chinesepeople's attitude toward foreigners in China will benefit not only future cross-culturalexchanges and interactions, but also the foreigners' acculturation in China.Using the Bogardus' (1925) Social Distance Scale and the Scale of Willingness toProvide Social Support to Sojourners in China, a adaptation of the Index of SojournerSocial Support (ISSS, Ong, 2006), Shanghai college students and workers' attitudetoward people from United States, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea wereinvestigated.The ordering assumption of Bogardus' Social Distance Scale was at first tested inShanghai college students and workers and the results show that the assumption doesnot fit in the current respondent groups. And respondents' average social distanceincreased in accordance with the order as follows: American, German, French, Korean,and Japanese.In addition, male's mean of social distance score for the Americans, Germans, Frenchand Korean are higher than that of female's, and males and females' score on socialdistance toward Japanese group did not show any significant difference.Adapt from of the ISSS, the new Scale of Willingness to Provide Social Support toSojourners in China contains 17 items, and also includes two subscales:socioemotional support willingness and instrumental support willingness.The new scale has excellent validity in its structure and content. Specifically, both ofthe two subscales show a high correlation with the 17-item scale while the twosubscales have only moderate correlation with each other. Also, the scale shows ahigh reliability.Respondents seem to score significantly lower in the scale of willingness to providehelp in sojourners' acculturation when those sojourners are from Japan than other fourcountries, and so did their socioemotional support scores toward Japanese sojourners.Respondents' social distance score for people of a certain country group related totheir willingness to help in their acculturation in China. Specifically, the higher theyscore in the social distance scale the less they seem to be willing to help in theiracculturation in China.