‘Every day is a challenge’: Expatriate acculturation in the United Arab Emirates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has a very small population of national citizens, so it relies on foreign workers who bring a range of cultures with them, resulting in a unique multi-cultural context. Unlike Western countries, such as the UK, Canada and Australia, workers are unable to permanently migrate to the UAE, so instead they hold temporary, expatriate status. This exploratory study focuses on the experiences of internationally qualified, expatriate nurses in hospitals in Al Ain, gathered by qualitative interviews. Twenty-one registered nurses participated in this study. The nurses faced challenges associated with language requirements and differing cultural expectations, and displayed limited acculturation, which compromised their ability to provide appropriate care for patients. The temporary nature of the work, cultural expectations, language difficulties and potential improvements are discussed. The findings have important implications for organizations that employ large groups of staff from overseas in all sectors. This article contributes to knowledge of expatriates’ challenges in the UAE and highlights the difficulties of working in a diverse environment, leading to a range of actions being recommended for managers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".