Issues and strategies for negotiating intercultural identity: Case studies in communication competence in reentry

The experience of students who study abroad involves repeated adjustment and readjustment to a series of social, behavioral and environmental changes. This dissertation examines theory and research in the areas of reentry, adjustment and the role of identity in intercultural communication competence and integrates it into a single model of intercultural communication competence in reentry. A coding scheme from that model was used to analyze intensive interviews with 13 U.S. students who had studied abroad. The results were used to identify specific identity concerns faced by those students and the communication strategies they used to renegotiate their identities during reentry from study abroad. Specifically, the research involved four steps: (1) Developing a clearly stated conceptual model that makes the connections between reentry adjustment, identity development, and intercultural communication competence explicit and gives an operational definition of reentry communication competence. (2) Conducting a series of intensive interviews with U.S. students returning from study abroad to test and refine the model. (3) Analyzing interview responses for emerging patterns with regard to identity concerns and the resulting communication coping strategies. (4) Developing a set coding scheme based on the integration of this analysis with the theoretical model developed in step 1.