Living outside one's home country is stressful. One important source of stress for the sojourner is the host society, with its unfamiliar cultural norms and not always friendly attitudes toward foreigners. Previous research suggests that perceptions of different kinds of threat coming from the host society (e.g., perceived discrimination) have a detrimental effect on sojourner adaptation and, indirectly, on its distal effects such as work outcomes. Therefore, social stressors may constitute an obstacle in realizing sojourners' potential within this society. However, in line with the stress and coping literature, their effect may be buffered by available coping resources, both socially-based (e.g., social support) and internal to the sojourner (e.g. multi-cultural personality). The current study examines the role of three social stressors (perceived discrimination, perceived prejudice and symbolic threat) in cross-cultural adaptation of international students, as well as their interactions with multi-cultural personality traits and with social factors known to act as coping resources in other contexts (social status, social support, social identification with minority group and attributions to prejudice). Two hundred and twenty international students, mostly European and participating in international exchanges, responded to an online questionnaire. As expected, adaptation was related negatively to all three examined social stressors, and positively to socially-based coping resources and to multi-cultural personality. Moreover, several moderation effects were found. High identification with the group of foreign students buffered the effect of perceived discrimination on both psychological and socio-cultural adaptation, and the effect of symbolic threat was significantly weaker in students with lower attributions to prejudice. Finally, only students low on open-mindedness reported worse adaptation when they lacked contact with host nationals. The results of our study suggest that applying models from social psychology (e.g., Integrated Threat Theory; rejection-identification model) in cross-cultural adaptation research may contribute tremendously to the understanding of this phenomenon

--

Cross-Cultural Adaptation, Social Stressors, Coping, Multi-Cultural Personality