Fitting in on Campus: How Acculturation Orientations Shape International Students’ Experiences of Restorativeness, Felt Belonging and Comfort

Abstract

Working from the cross-cultural, social and environmental psychology perspectives, this thesis investigates where international students in a UK university experience belonging and restorativeness on campus. This thesis starts by introducing the broad perspectives of work already done in this domain (i.e., Chapter 1 of the thesis). Following that are three empirical chapters which contain five studies, they are: Study 1 (n = 391), a cross-sectional survey that examined the physical spaces on campus that university students stereotypically associate with international students, how those spaces are perceived in terms of their purposes, and the descriptions of international students who occupy the spaces (i.e., Chapter 2 of the thesis); Study 2 and 3 (n = 260 and 244 respectively) that experimentally tested how being in campus spaces with different social profiles (i.e., majority-owned versus minority-owned) impact on international students’ experiences of space and academic performance (i.e., Chapter 3 of the thesis); Study 4 (n = 294), a cross-sectional survey, and Study 5 (n = 174), a longitudinal survey, both of which explored the campus spaces international students freely use, felt comfort in specific campus spaces, and felt belonging of the campus as a whole in relation to their group identification on campus and well-being outcomes (i.e., Chapter 4 of the thesis). Altogether, the empirical work presented in this thesis paints a picture of international students’ psychological experience of campus spaces in a British campus, and specifically of the factors shaping their feeling of belonging in the campus that they have come to study. This thesis ends by discussing the implications for research at the theoretical level, and some practical applications for the university management, simultaneously pointing towards interesting directions for further research in this area.