Cross-cultural Adaptation Of American Sojourners In China

As the number of American sojourners in China has been rocketing these years, it's important to address issues of their adaptation.However, few studies have been conducted in this domain.To fill this blank, this study investigates adaptation levels, influential variables and outcome variable of American sojourners in China, by using both qualitative and quantitative methods.In the qualitative part, there are 15 international students and workers participating in semi-structured interview. The result indicates several influential factors of cross-cultural adaptation, including motivation, identity, expected duration in China, adaptation strategy, openness, tolerance, language competence, communication style, social support and cultural differences between China and the U.S.The result also suggests that most of American sojourners prefer strategy of integration in public domain and strategy of separation in private domain.In the quantitative part, this study assesses socio-cultural adaptation and psychological adaptation (via general health and life satisfaction) of 65 American international students in China as well as influential variables and outcome variable by self-reported questionnaire. The result demonstrates that:(1)the ratings of participants'socio-cultural adaptation and psychological adaptation are above median, (2) there are positive correlations between socio-cultural adaptation, general health and life satisfaction.Research on influential factors reveals that gender and duration has no significant effect on cross-cultural adaptation.The finding of path analysis indicates that:(1) emotional stability and socio-cultural adaptation are positive indicators of general health, (2) cultural empathy, emotional stability and socio-cultural adaptation are positive indicators of life satisfaction, (3) host-national identification openness and emotional stability are positive indicators for socio-cultural adaptation, (4) Chinese competence is negative indicator of life satisfaction, (5) social initiative factor has no significant effect on psychological adaptation, and (6) host-national identification shows main effect on socio-cultural adaptation.