Making meaning from acculturative stress: Chinese international students' experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Individuals from mainland China and Hong Kong comprise 24% of all international students enrolled in Canadian universities. Research has shown that Chinese international students will experience an array of culturally-based stressors while adjusting to life in Canada. Such stressors include discrepant cultural norms, linguistic barriers, and academic difficulties. The purpose of this exploratory, mixed methods study was to determine how Chinese international university students make meaning out of the acculturative stress they experience while studying in Canada. Three measures, the Coping Schemas Inventory-Revised (Wong, Reker & Peacock, 2006), Chinese Making Sense of Adversity Scale (Pan, Wong, Chan & Chan, 2008a), and Acculturative Stress Scale for International Students (Sandhu & Asrabadi, 1994 ), were administered to 140 Chinese international students studying at two Canadian institutions. As well, participants provided a qualitative descriptive critical incident describing how they coped with a culturally-based stressful situation. The following questions were addressed: What are the relationships between perceived level of acculturative stress, type of coping, and use of sensemaking? How does length of residency in Canada affect perceived level of acculturative stress? Do Chinese students use meaning-making as a strategy to cope with acculturative stress and if so, how is this strategy helpful for them? It was found that perceived acculturative stress was correlated with passive-emotional coping strategies. The use of sense-making was correlated with meaning, self-restructuring, and situational coping strategies. Neither acculturative stress nor use of sense-making was correlated with age, length of residency in Canada, or with each other. Meaning-making was reported by the majority of participants as a means of coping with acculturative stressors, most of which were academic in nature. Other stressors were interpersonal (i.e., isolation, relationships) or pertained to career, bureaucratic/lifestyle, or language issues. Meaning-making was assessed on two dimensions with corresponding themes: sense-making (i.e., contemplation, self-talk, and acceptance) and benefit-finding (i.e., opportunity, optimism, and enjoyment). A seventh theme, preparation, was thought to belong to both dimensions. This study provided new understanding about acculturative stress as experienced by Chinese international students. The author provided recommendations for university counsellors who work with these students as well as suggestions for broader institutional programs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".