Coping with culture shock: a study of stressors, adjustments and stereotypes among chinese students at bangkok university

Limitations of the study

In the research, there are 40 interviewees are interviewed. The amount of interviewee is not that much due to limited time and spending for research. Also, some of interviewees are interviewed via telephone; thus, their talking is not that much and focused as face-to-face interviews. In addition, the processes of interviews have not been recorded since limited facility to support to the research.
In addition, for some interviewees, they could not highlight their talking on intercultural communication field since they do not have a clear concept about intercultural communication. They need interviewer’s lead to interact. In somehow, the interaction may not able to generate an objective expression from interviewees.

Moreover, the research findings are hard to make a compare between each stage since it is a qualitative study; thus, it is very hard to make a conclusion which is related to U-curve culture shock concept. Only numbers of stressors could be compared in findings based on amount of stressor that interviewees mentioned. However, interviewees’ level of stress can be not measured by amount of stressors; it has to be measured by amount of stress, but stressor.

4. Recommendations

For future research, size of sample could be increased for better result. And more time and spending are required to complete the qualitative research. Also, interviews would be better to be done by face-to-face interview. By doing in face-to-face interview, interviewees will focus on interview and talking, and they will provide more information on the topic. In addition, it is better to record conversation in interviews by voice recorder, but not only record key points by writing. The recorded voice will help research recall the conversation in interview.

Moreover, a brief introduction to intercultural communication is needed if any interviewee does not understand what intercultural communication is. Otherwise, interviewee will talk too much unrelated things and waste time for interviewee and interviewer. And, after interviewees get a brief picture about intercultural communication, let them free to talk with related things. And do not give too much lead to interviewees.

Otherwise, they will only focus on what interviewer leaded topic and can not give a free talk. It will influence the quality of research finding, too subjective.

It is suggest planning a research with both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. For qualitative part, interviews can be conducted for collecting deeper information such as interviewees’ deep feeling and open minds. And, a quantitative method is used as well. A questionnaire could be design for large samples. And basic data could be collected through this method. Also, the result of quantitative part could used to make a compare among each group. For example, for compare stress level among

4 groups, a stress scale could be designed and use to measure stress level. In addition, size of sample could be different in qualitative method and quantitative method.

Qualitative method could choose a small size and quantitative could choose a large size.