Locating The Moderating Factors Inlfuencing Acculturation Outcomes Of British Working In Shanghai

Acculturation has always been a hot topic of discussion in the field of interculturalcommunication. In overseas academia, the research of acculturation has obtainedtremendous development with a large number of acculturation models andmeasurement scales proposed by researchers and scholars from different academicdisciplines and with a wide range of applications in the areas of psychology, medicinescience, and so on. However in China, intercultural communication research started inthe early1980s. The subjects of acculturation research were confined to the culturaladaptation of Chinese abroad. With the increasing implementation of China’sopening-up policy, the number of British sojourners working in China is rising fast,which turns the research of foreigners’ acculturation in China into hot concern. Thepresent study aims to find out the acculturation outcomes and their moderating factorsof British sojourners by combining both qualitative and quantitative methods.In the qualitative study, ten British sojourners working in Shanghai participated insemi-structured interview. The interview results indicated their level of adaptation andthe influencing factors of their acculturation outcomes, from which some of theinfluencing factors were chosen as the major independent variables in questionnaire.Also the results showed that the acculturation outcomes could be classified into threeaspects: sociocultural and psychological acculturation, satisfaction of life and work,and the construction of intercultural identity, which were affected by the length of stayin China, cross-cultural communication (including Chinese competency), socialsupport, and personality.In the quantitative study, due to lack of valid scale measuring intercultural identity,the questionnaire assessed the sociocultural acculturation, psychological acculturation,and satisfaction of life and work of fifty-six British sojourners. It was found that theoverall acculturation is above the average level, and sociocultural acculturation waspositively related to psychological acculturation and satisfaction of life and work. In addition, attitudes toward home culture and attitudes toward host culture wereindependent.Research on the influencing factors revealed that gender, age, career, and educationhad no significant difference on the three acculturation outcomes. The results ofcorrelation coefficient and multiple regression analyses indicated that length of stay inChina, Chinese proficiency, social supports and personality (except flexibility) hadpositive prediction for acculturation outcomes, among which social support had thegreatest influence.