A Study On Psychological Adjustment Of University International Students:The Effect Of Social Support,Selfefficacy And Interpersonal Communication

Contemporary business environment is rapidly becoming increasingly international.Employees’ adaptation to an international work environment and to novel cultural environments has become a critically important business issue as increasingly more employees work internationally.The fact that some expatriates adjust more quickly and easily than others is self-evident,but the reasons for differences in cross-cultural adaptation are not.With the expansion of globalization and the rapid development of China’s economy,the number of international students that come to China to study is increasing.Therefore,the question of their cultural adaptation remains very important.This research answers the following research question: What factors influence the level of international students’ psychological adjustment in a new cultural environment? In order to answer this question in our research work we investigated the relationship between students’ perceived social support,self-efficacy and their psychological adjustment.We proposed a positive effect of perceived social support on psychological adjustment and a mediation role of self-efficacy between these two research variables.At the same time this research suggests an important moderation role that foreign students’ ethnic communication,communication with foreigners and communication with local people play in self-efficacy and psychological adjustment relationship.To empirically test our hypotheses,we created and distributed two rounds of questionnaire survey and collected survey data from 125 international students from 41 different countries studying in Shanghai.Data was collected across four different universities.All participants were full-time Bachelor’s,Master’s or Doctor’s degree students or were enrolled for language courses at their universities.Participants were majoring in management,international business,architecture,finance,economics,biomedical engineering and Chinese language studies.Data analysis supported our hypothesis on positive relation between perceived social supports,general self-efficacy and psychological adjustment.It also indicated a negative moderation effect of ethnic interpersonal communication that proved to have a weakening impact on relation between self-efficacy and psychological adjustment.Unlike ethnic communication,frequent communication with other foreigners proved to have a positive moderation effect as data analysis exhibited its strengthen impact on selfefficacy and psychological adjustment relationship.The hypothesis on moderation role of communication with local people wasn’t supported by data analysis.We discussed the results as well as study limitations and direction for future research in the last chapters.