STUDY ABROAD, INTERCULTURAL FRIENDSHIP, AND TRANSFORMATION OF SELF AND SOCIETY

An Independent Study Thesis

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for graduation in Global Development Studies

at The College of Wooster

By Laura Valencia

The College of Wooster March 2012

Adviser: Dr. Amyaz Moledina

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Acknowledgements Writing this paper has forced me to examine my own abilities and limitations, rough up the edge of my comfort zone, and experiment with independence, dependence, and interdependence. It has called me to be highly reflective and confront challenging ideas. In many ways, writing this Senior Independent Study forced me to go “abroad,” though intellectually rather than physically. And now that I’m done, it’s good to come back home. It’s not The End though; it’s not my nature. After all, the last time I came back from being abroad, I ended up writing a thesis about it! I am indebted to those who have supported me in this process: family, friends, and mentors alike. (especially two people in my life who are all of the above).

“Sometimes I recognize myself in others. I recognize myself in those who endure, friends who will shelter me, beautiful holy fools of justice and flying creatures of beauty and

other bums and vagrants who will walk the earth and will continue walking, just as the story will continue in the night and the waves in the sea. Then, when I recognize myself in them, I am the air, coming to know myself as part of the wind. When I am no longer, the

wind will be, will continue being.”

Eduardo Galeano (1989) “The air and the wind”

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Abstract Intercultural contact differentiates study abroad from both tourism and at-home education. The “contact zone” – where intercultural encounters occur – is on the edge of the comfort zone for many students abroad and provides an opportunity for increasing clarity of positioning and dismantling of mental boundaries. Students who have engaged in reciprocal intercultural relationships demonstrate increased understanding of self, the other, and their mutual interconnectedness. Student transformation through intercultural contact is supported by Contact Theory (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011) and standards for transformative contact are provided by Martin Buber in his book I and Thou (1954). In this study, I find that American students prefer conationals for friendship and company, with host nationals serving as means to ends related to consumption and tourism. I describe the student-consumer and student-tourist and offer methods for supporting positive student transformation.

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TableofContentsTableofContents ..................................................................................................................................v

Figures ................................................................................................................................................... vii

Tables..................................................................................................................................................... viiI.Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 1Transformation................................................................................................................................................2Operationalizingtransformationininternationaleducation:Acasestudy ..........................................2

Onthesignificanceofinternationaleducation .....................................................................................5Onthesignificanceofinterculturalcontact ...........................................................................................6Culturalbordersandstudyabroad...........................................................................................................8Conclusion .........................................................................................................................................................9

II.LiteratureReview:PositioningInterculturalContactinStudyAbroad .....................10Shiftingframeworksofinquiry ............................................................................................................... 10Interculturalcontactininternationaleducation .............................................................................. 14Me,myself&I:Individualinfluencesonhost‐culturecontact..................................................................14Me,myself,&allmyfriends:Socialnetworksandsojourners .................................................................16ThePrimaryNetwork:Monoculturalsupport.................................................................................................21TheSecondaryNetwork:Biculturalutility........................................................................................................22TheTertiaryNetwork:Multiculturalrecreation ............................................................................................25

Critiqueoftheliterature............................................................................................................................ 26Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................... 26ContactTheory .............................................................................................................................................. 29I­Thou............................................................................................................................................................... 33ABCmodelofacculturation ...................................................................................................................... 36JohnRawlsandjustice................................................................................................................................ 37Theoryinthecontextofstudyabroad .................................................................................................. 39Consumerism .................................................................................................................................................................40TheTouristGaze...........................................................................................................................................................41Colonialism......................................................................................................................................................................43

Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................... 45IV.Methods...........................................................................................................................................48Overview ......................................................................................................................................................... 48Theexperimentalsettingandstudyabroadpopulation ................................................................ 48Thesurveyinstrument ............................................................................................................................... 48Subjects............................................................................................................................................................ 51Procedure ....................................................................................................................................................... 51Testinghypotheses ...................................................................................................................................... 53

V.Findings ............................................................................................................................................55Describingthedataset:Programs,activities,andaccommodation ........................................... 55Respondents’cross‐culturalbackground,expectationsandsatisfaction............................................56Generalassociationpatterns ...................................................................................................................................57Generalfriendshippatterns.....................................................................................................................................57Companionshippreferences&activityparticipation...................................................................................58

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Summaryofpartialcorrelations............................................................................................................................60Relatingsocializationpatternsandactivitypatterns ...................................................................................61

Independentvariable1:Hostcountryaccessibility......................................................................... 61Accessibility&satisfaction.......................................................................................................................................61Accessibility&friendshippatterns.......................................................................................................................62Accessibility&activityparticipation ...................................................................................................................63Accessibility&preferredcompanions ................................................................................................................63

IndependentVariable2:Program­levelhostcultureintegration............................................... 64Program&friendshippatterns ..............................................................................................................................64Program&activityparticipation ...........................................................................................................................65Program&companionshippreferences.............................................................................................................65

IndependentVariable3:IndividualOpenness................................................................................... 66IndividualOrientation&FriendshipPatterns .................................................................................................67IndividualVariables&CompanionshipPreferences ....................................................................................69

Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................... 70VI.Discussion ......................................................................................................................................71Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 71StudyBias........................................................................................................................................................ 71Categorizingactivities:Experiencevs.Relation ................................................................................ 72Student­as­Consumer ................................................................................................................................. 74Student­as­Tourist ....................................................................................................................................... 76CombiningtheStudent­ConsumerandStudent­Tourist:TheUltimateIt­World................... 79I­thou ................................................................................................................................................................ 80Reviewofthetheory ................................................................................................................................... 83Analteredmodelfortransformation.................................................................................................... 86

VI.Conclusion......................................................................................................................................87CounteringConsumerism.......................................................................................................................... 88TransformingtheTouristGaze ............................................................................................................... 88Developingahealthythirdculture ........................................................................................................ 89Goingglobalvs.local ................................................................................................................................... 89RevisitingTransformation........................................................................................................................ 90

WorksCited..........................................................................................................................................92AppendixA:QuantitativeData ......................................................................................................96CompanionshipPreferences ..................................................................................................................101ParticipationRates ....................................................................................................................................106

AppendixB:QualitativeData...................................................................................................... 109

AppendixC:Survey......................................................................................................................... 116

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FiguresFigure 1: MSID educational philosophy as applied to the ABC Model ......................................... 3Figure 2: Institutional goals and individual change as reflected on the ABC model for Acculturation (Ward et al. 2001) .................................................................................................. 12Figure 3: Berry's theory of acculturation (1997), based on Figure 3.3 from Sam & Berry (2008)....................................................................................................................................................... 16Figure 4: Comparing friendship patterns in Bochner et al. (1977), Furnham & Alibhai (1985), and Valencia (2011)...................................................................................................................... 19Figure 5: Allport (1954), Pettigrew (1995), and Buber (1937) within the ABC model of Acculturation (Ward et al., 2001) ................................................................................................. 37Figure 6: Example "Satisfaction" section ..................................................................................... 49Figure 7: Association patterns ...................................................................................................... 50Figure 8: Preferred companion table............................................................................................. 50Figure 9: Companionship preferences & host country accessibility ............................................ 64Figure 10: Program type and companionship preferences............................................................ 66Figure 11: Applying theory to companionship preference ........................................................... 73Figure 12: Applying Pettigrew (1998) to study abroad, with qualitative examples ..................... 82Figure 13: Traditional model for student transformation ............................................................. 86Figure 14: Adapted model for student transformation.................................................................. 86

TablesTable 1: Valencia (2011) Companionship Preferences ................................................................ 20Table 2: Valencia (2011) friendship patterns................................................................................ 21Table 3: Qualitative examples of Allport's four essential conditions for positive cross-group contact ........................................................................................................................................... 30Table 4: Processes from Pettigrew (1998) and their applications in study abroad....................... 31Table 5: Activities listings across Bochner et al. (1977), Furnham & Alibhai (1985), and Valencia (2011)............................................................................................................................. 52Table 6: Participation in program-level activities......................................................................... 55Table 7: Student accommodation while studying abroad ............................................................. 56Table 8: Top 3 reasons for going abroad ...................................................................................... 56Table 9: Companionship Preferences ........................................................................................... 59Table 11: Partial Correlation between independent variables and activity companionship preferences and participation ........................................................................................................ 60Table 12: Categorization of Host Countries based on Host Country Accessibility...................... 61Table 13: Pair-wise Correlation of Host Country Accessibility and Satisfaction ........................ 61Table 14: Host country accessibility & friendship patterns.......................................................... 62Table 15: US-Oriented students.................................................................................................... 62Table 16: Host-Oriented students ................................................................................................. 63Table 17: Program-level host culture integration & Friendship patterns ..................................... 64Table 18: Program-level host culture integration & rates of US orientation................................ 65Table 19: Program-level host culture integration & rates of host national orientation ................ 65Table 20: Stata analysis of individual-level variables .................................................................. 68

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Table 21: C-E-D model................................................................................................................. 84

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I.IntroductionPositive intercultural contact is an encounter where two or more individuals reconcile respective worldviews and enjoy mutual benefit. Intercultural contact takes place in contact zones – “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt, 1991). Points of contact such as these provide opportunities for individual transformation, empirically demonstrated in terms of reduced intergroup prejudice and increased empathy (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011). Many factors influence the characteristics of each instance of intercultural contact – including individual aspects of both people involved and structural aspects that have formed the context within which they meet. In each unique encounter, individual and structural variables interplay to influence individual-level transformation, ultimately influencing wider social transformation. In order for the most transformative intercultural contact to take place, I hypothesize authentic interpersonal relationships must exist, which in this study are measured through friendship patterns. Authentic interpersonal friendship provides an opportunity for asymmetrical relations of power to be challenged and mutually beneficial, reciprocal exchange to take place.

Intercultural contact is a central aspect of study abroad.1 Study abroad participants are part of a larger population of “international sojourners,” which also includes tourists, international students in the US, expatriate workers, international civil servants, and military personal. Each of these groups is differentiated from the others in terms of the purpose of the sojourn and the timeframe (Bochner, 2006). Oftentimes students can receive academic rigor, career opportunities, independence, and opportunities to explore new interests without leaving their home institutions. The draw of study abroad is that students can continue to experience aspects of their life that they already like and understand, but within a new context of their own choice. In this day and age, study abroad programs cater to students from every field of study, language ability, and previous international experience. Students select the endorsed study abroad program that is most likely to provide an experience that aligns with their values and interests while also giving an opportunity to develop them. Students fix the range of potential exploration based on their understanding of their own comfort zones. Upon arrival, their ability to control the spectrum of their exposure to the host culture shrinks, but remains highly influenced by the institution of international education, which profits from the students’ satisfaction. Both individual and structural variables will be considered in the present study.

Intercultural contact in study abroad is a fascinating endeavor, and the contact zone is often one of utter power disparity. The American student abroad is one of the most privileged actors in any kind of intercultural relationship. He or she voluntarily enters into intercultural encounters with a genuine interest in the other person, but also has the ability to disregard them as soon as their interest wanes. They can remove themselves at any time, either by retreating into the cocoon of an American program and companions or by leaving the country altogether. By participating in a study abroad program, it is evident that they already are inheriting a great

1 In this study, I will use “intercultural” and “cross-cultural” interchangeably. In addition, for the purposes of this study, the sample of American students’ “co-nationals” and “co-culturals” refers to US Americans (which I will shorten to “Americans”); “host national” and “host cultural” will both mean originating from the student’s destination; and “other national” and “other cultural” will pertain to individuals from neither the US nor the host country.

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amount of privilege, and while abroad, this privilege is only amplified. The institution of international education, along with the hospitality industry and the tourism industry, solely exist to make sure that the sojourner’s needs are met. This context of study abroad provides a space in which the sojourner has the ultimate safety net, in theory accompanied by a genuine desire to enjoy all of the benefits of being abroad, including intercultural contact. However, with privilege comes the responsibility to “live a life of consequence” (Reilly & Senders, 2009). Thus the impetus emerges for individual transformation through authentic relationship.

In this introduction, I will first define the terms “transformation,” “international education,” and “cross-cultural contact” and provide case studies. Then, I will discuss the interrelatedness of each of these concepts. Finally, I will describe the direction of this research and summarize my organization of the Literature Review, Theory, Methods, and Discussion chapters.

TransformationThe ongoing process transformation has three components.

• Clarity of positioning: This refers to reappraisal of how “voices” are situated within “vectors of time, space, and social power” (Sage 2004). In developing clarity of positioning, an understanding of self expands to include not only self-perception but also the perception of oneself by others. Additionally, we critically examine the existing influence of large social structures and the meaning of complicity and participation in them. Developing clarity of positioning is characterized by a recurring realization of human interconnectedness and the impulse for engagement.

• Dismantling of mental boundaries: A singular worldview is reconsidered to support and understand others’ worldviews. This process is essentially a transition from sympathetic to empathetic interaction. Rather than seeking to understand others on our own “terms,” we seek to understand them on their own “terms.”

• Acting upon an understanding of mutuality and reciprocity: The process of transformation is not meant to be enacted in solitude; we must collaborate with others to be mutually accountable and mutually beneficial citizens as part of the process of creating equalizing and just organizational structures. This is the vehicle for wider social change through individual transformation.

This understanding of transformation will be explored and supported by examining the writings of theologian Martin Buber in tandem with the legacies of Gandhi, King, and other social activists. Martin Buber thought that only through whole, reciprocated relationships could a transformational process take place. My analysis will also be supported by the ABC Theory of acculturation (Ward et al., 2001), which categorizes individual change as affective, behavioral, and cognitive processes and outcomes, as well as Allport’s Contact Hypothesis (1954). Theorists vary in emphasizing process versus outcome, the individual versus the society, and the existence of an inherited responsibility that comes with privilege. Additionally, the centrality of meaningful relationships in theories of transformation plays a role in my empirical research on friendship patterns.

Operationalizingtransformationininternationaleducation:AcasestudyIn order to concretize the ideal of student transformation, I will discuss the goals delineated in the educational philosophy of my former study abroad program (University of Minnesota Studies

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in International Development [MSID], 2005). The program’s broad mission is to “transform values, minds and society,” and includes an academic emphasis on “rethinking” international development, a service component at a non-profit organization, language preparation, and a home stay. In the educational philosophy, collaboratively written by staff and program alumni, the authors list nine specific habits of “thought and engagement” that study abroad participants are pushed to develop. The habits specified in this program’s educational philosophy (see Table 1) point towards affective, behavioral, and cognitive transformation2 – three parts of the Colleen Ward’s “ABC Model” for acculturation (Ward et al., 2001). In her model, Ward maps out the A-B-C processes that result in correlated A-B-C outcomes; later in this paper I will demonstrate A-B-C outcomes, but for now I will focus on the first part of the model by invoking the nine University of Minnesota habits, or as the authors call them, “lifelong processes.” In the figure below (Figure 1), the correlation between the MSID habits for lifelong learning and the ABC model is depicted. In the following text box, I have listed representative quotes for each lifelong habit from the original document’s detailed descriptions.

Figure 1: MSID educational philosophy3 as applied to the ABC Model4

2 In the ABC model, psychological adjustments are considered “affective” outcomes, socio-cultural adaptations are “behavioral” outcomes, and cultural identity and inter-group perceptions are “cognitive” outcomes (as cited in Masgoret & Ward, 2006, p. 59). 3 University of Minnesota (2005) 4 Ward, et al. (2001) as cited in Masgoret & Ward (2006, fig. 1.)

Cognitive Processes #2 Extract meaning from experience #3 Understand the intimate relationship between knowledge and power #4 Savor diversity #5 Invoke the global context #6 Take a long-term perspective

Cognitive Outcomes “cultural identity and inter-group perceptions”

Affective Processes #7 Cultivate empathy

Affective Outcomes “psychological adjustments”

Behavioral Processes #8 Foster community #9 Translate insights and values into action

Behavioral Outcomes “socio-cultural adaptations”

#1 Think, act, and feel holistically

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The first habit (thinking, feeling, and acting holistically) unites the three ABC dimensions. The second through sixth habits describe the cognitive dimension of transformation, in which students shift from an ethnocentric to ethnorelative understanding of the world and place new value on resources, peoples, cultures, and the world at large. The seventh habit, cultivating empathy, speaks to the affective dimension. Empathy refers to more than a mere tolerance of others but also an acceptance and promotion of others’ worldviews. When students co-cultivate empathy and cognitive development, they may move beyond judging their newly valued world from only their own point of view, but also from the point of view of others. In

1. Think, feel, and act holistically: Students should “value many kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing… the beginning of injustice is the illusion of separation.”

2. Extract meaning from experience: Students should “move continually back and forth between experience and ideas… apply theories, concepts, and modes of analysis to help understand their experiences, but also to critique these same theories, concepts, and tools in the light of the experiences.”

3. Understand the intimate relationship between knowledge and power: Students should “see more that knowledge is socially constructed…ask who has produced particular knowledge, on what perceptions of reality is that knowledge built, whose interests does it serve, and how might knowledge based on other realities and interests differ… constantly reflect on what voices are absent or distorted in public discourse and in media portrayals.”

4. Savor diversity: Students should “be addicted to interdisciplinary thinking and … seek always to understand a variety of perspectives before formulating their own positions.”

5. Invoke the global context: Students should “be capable of questioning the assumptions that underlie current ways of doing things, and of thinking creatively about alternatives… In ways big or small, [students] should find themselves striving to build north-south bridges.”

6. Take a long-term perspective: Students should “question models of development that are unsustainable and … challenge progress that is based on borrowing from those yet to come.”

7. Cultivate empathy: Students should “experience aspects of reality from the frame of reference of others, to value their skills and insights, and to walk-at least mentally – in their shoes.”

8. Foster community: Students should recognize that “all teachers are learners and all learners are teachers” and develop a sense of “respect for the power of community and a commitment to contributing effectively to the communities in which they participate.”

9. Translate insights and values into action: Students “rethink who they are… they continually reflect on their own relationship to issues of injustice and oppression… alumni should leave lives of effective action coupled with critical reflection. They should have a lifelong passion for justice and a lifelong habit of thoughtful civic engagement.” (MSID, 2005)

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some ways, this can also lead to more certainty about one’s own beliefs, but with a greater understanding of their origin. The last two habits, fostering community and translating insights and values into action, speak to behavioral transformation. Students need to think differently to feel differently and feel differently to act differently. A transformation of thought and feeling will affect the individual; a transformation of action will extend to those around them.

OnthesignificanceofinternationaleducationThe challenge that the field of study abroad undertakes is simultaneously to provide cross-cultural exposure, academic rigor, experiential learning,5 and personal growth for students in higher education. Complementing intercultural exchange, internship placements abroad, traditions such as the “Grand Tour,” voluntourism,6 and international service-learning, study abroad7 plays a central role in the pre-career life of a student attracted to global learning. Many scholars have addressed and raised questions about the power of international education as a transformative experience.

According to intercultural communication educator Janet Bennett (2008), international education is a core achievement for those seeking to be global learners and leaders; in fact, there is an identifiable “rightful place” which study abroad should occupy in higher education. Scholar-practitioners John and Lilli Engle (2002) emphasize the current climate of a globalizing world – characterized by immense shared risk, along with cultural homogenization – as a new context within which study abroad needs to be analyzed. This frames the call to action that Doug Reilly and Stefan Senders (2009) respond to with the alternative of “Critical Study Abroad,” a product that first sheds former foci such as idealist internationalism and national-diplomacy skill building and then answers questions of global crisis. Other critiques of international education contest the frameworks that U.S. American programs abroad inevitably reproduce, such as consumerism and colonialism (Ogden, 2007; Engle & Engle, 2002; Bolen, 2001). Nevertheless, all scholars agree that international education, when designed and executed properly, has great potential for students to expand their comfort zones, “unfreeze” their frameworks, overcome a “tourist gaze,” and begin to understand their host and home contexts from a more inclusive worldview.8 In short, according to industry providers, participants, and scholars, international education can change lives.

In the academy, a student abroad is typically termed a “sojourner,” defined as a person who ventures away from home temporarily. This word introduces an important aspect of international education, temporality. While students abroad may undergo processes of acclimatization and acculturation, comparable to those that migrant and expatriate communities experience, students measure their study abroad experience9 in terms of semesters and credits.

5 Experiential learning includes learning by oneself (“nature’s way of learning”) and experiential education (learning through programs structured by others that facilitate direct experiences of phenomenon that will lead to genuine learning) (Smith 2003). 6 Voluntary service experiences that include travel to a destination in order to realize one’s service intentions; the conscious, seamlessly integrated combination of voluntary service to a destination with the traditional elements of travel and tourism (arts, culture, geography, history, and recreation). (www.voluntourism.org). 7 Credit-bearing, overseas programs for undergraduates that have a duration of at least three months or a semester (Hoff, 2008, p. 55). 8 “A comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world, especially from a specific standpoint” (Woolf, 1977, p 1331 as cited in Hoff, 2008, p. 55). 9 “Events or actions that take place during study abroad including culture learning” (Hoff, 2008, p. 55).

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Temporality differentiates international education from other forms of cross-cultural exchange, as does the academic focus. Though other informal curricula may be increasingly integrated, such as reflection, development of intercultural competence,10 experiential learning, vocational exploration, and service, academics remain the central motivation for the field of international education, differentiating it from other forms of international sojourns such as tourism and international humanitarian aid work. That said, students often follow Mark Twain’s advice and try not to let academics get in the way of their education.

One aspect of education while abroad is intercultural contact. In the contact zone, students are forced to relinquish elements of control and power that they can maintain in other spheres of their life abroad. They must confront others’ realities and accommodate others’ worldviews. According to scholar Robert Selby, “What students describe as ‘life-transforming’ is, at root, the experience of seeing themselves, their culture and values, in some new way, as perceived through the lens—that is, feedback – of the host culture” (2008, p. 8). Although “host culture” is the common terminology, I prefer to consider a host culture as a “foster culture.” The term “host” brings to mind ideas of entertainment, invitation, or even “someone who has been invaded by a pathogenic organism” (Merriam-Webster). However, the term “foster” implies responsibility for the development of an aspect of another. In this sense, the culture accepting the study abroad participants for the time being is more of a foster culture than a host culture. Because the literature uses the phrase “host culture,” I will continue to do so; however, I prefer the connotation of the phrase “foster culture” instead. Through meaningful intercultural interaction, fostered by optimal intercultural contact, students may develop new affective, behavioral, and cognitive skill-sets and foci. In the present study, this development will be measured and analyzed in terms of friendship and companionship preferences.

OnthesignificanceofinterculturalcontactIn a globalizing world, intercultural contact is increasingly a facet of everyday life. However, it does not occur in a global vacuum where all actors believe that “all cultures are created equal” –rather, Western “monoculture” dominates while indigenous and small-scale cultures flounder. Individual intercultural interaction is clouded by already existing perceptions and prejudices and influenced by massive power structures managed by the media, the government, and cultural memory. However, in this encounter, an opportunity exists: intercultural contact may be a moment where the hegemonic “master narrative” is interrupted, where the “single story” is fragmented.

This contact may occur in a quotidian routine between individuals in line at the supermarket, in an intimate relationship between lovers, or between two individuals at either end of a supply chain. Contact does not have to be in-person, it does not have to be between equals, and it does not have to move beyond the superficial. However, a context which provides an opportunity for these conditions is much more likely to result in positive outcomes for both individuals involved. This is what G.A. Allport theorized in his seminal book The Nature of Prejudice (1954). Later in this paper, Allport’s contact hypothesis will be introduced and supported with work from social psychologists Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp, who have recently written a meta-analysis of all 515 existing studies relating to contact theory (2011).

10 “The ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations based on one’s intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (Deardorff, 2008, p. 33).

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Empirically, intercultural contact is has demonstrated a laundry list of “positive outcomes.” These include reduced prejudice to members of the outgroup, reduced anxiety related to intergroup interactions, and reduced perceptions of individual and collective threat. Additionally, there is increased trust, forgiveness, empathy, and perspective-taking between group members. Ingroup members have increased outgroup knowledge, perceive higher outgroup rationality, and have stronger ingroup identification. There is increased job attainment and satisfaction. Attitudes toward social change and policies affecting outgroups become more positive, and perceptions of outgroup variability increase (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011, p. 205). For students abroad, effects of increased intercultural contact include improvement in studies, higher satisfaction with their sojourn, reduced anxiety, increased self esteem and abilities in modulating emotional responses to acculturative stressors, and creativity in managing cultural difficulties (Ward & Kennedy, 1993 a&b as cited in Bochner, 2006; Savicki, 2011).

An effective way of measuring intergroup contact is through friendship network analysis as “cross-group friendships are uniquely effective for yielding reduced prejudice” (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011). In fact, cross-group friendship warrants an entire chapter in Pettigrew and Tropp’s meta-analysis. Cross-group friendship has been operationalized in many ways – varying from quantity of time spent, to perceived closeness, to self-disclosure. The present study is highly influenced by a survey of international students’ friendship patterns from 1977. The three authors, Bochner, MacLeod, and Lin, analyzed intercultural contact in study abroad by measuring the friendship networks of foreign students. The researchers revealed three distinct social networks that foreign students take part in while abroad: first, a primary monocultural network for emotional support; second, a secondary bi-cultural network including host nationals for utilitarian purposes; third, multi-cultural network for recreational purposes. This study has strong implications for the unmet potential of intercultural contact in study abroad. From the Bochner et al. research, it appears that intercultural contact is relegated to being “means to an end” – students consult co-nationals or fellow-foreigners for close support and interact with host nationals purely for functional purposes. The rates of friendship with host nationals are not indicative of quality host-cultural contact, and while positive contact outcomes exist, they are not maximized.

The 1977 study by Bochner et al. was later replicated by Furnham and Alibhai in 1985. This survey provided a positive check on the functional model for social networks that Bochner et al. developed. During my junior independent study research, I also implemented the same study, and found in my sample of foreign students and NGO interns living in Rajasthan, India even lower rates of friendship with host nationals and even more distinct social networks. Later in this paper, I will both describe in detail the previous literature related to these studies and implement the survey myself to provide an empirical check for my theoretical arguments related to the significance of intercultural contact in international education. Initial findings of the present study suggest that the Bochner et al. functional networks for international students in the West also apply to American students abroad. Not only do US students have majority co-national friends, for activities ranging from deeply personal to everyday, American students prefer other American companions to host national companions.

Understanding what makes intercultural contact transformative has become an important enterprise in social psychology and highly relevant in study abroad. In the present research, I seek to analyze friendship networks in order to determine which individual and structural variables influence the quality of intercultural contact. The three conceptual variables I use are (1) host country accessibility (how far outside of the comfort zone the host country is), (2)

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program-level integration (to what degree the student is integrated into the community by the program), and (3) individual level influences (e.g. language ability and previous experience). Scholars are clear that it intercultural contact is not a “panacea”, though it still remains key: “Intergroup contact is by no means the only important process in intergroup harmony, but it is an essential one. Ultimately, lasting institutional alterations are necessary, but these macro changes both initiate and are supported by positive intergroup contact” (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011, p. 216). In this paper, I seek to understand not only individual influences on intergroup harmony but also which “institutional alterations” in the study abroad industry will be most profitable to all involved.

CulturalbordersandstudyabroadReilly and Senders (2009) include “Study the ‘Borders’” as one prescription for developing a more responsible and responsive field of international education. They are referring to socio-political borders, ever important in an increasingly transnational world. In integrating this suggestion beyond educational curriculum, and deeper into the very ethos of international education, one may notice that international education often comes with “borders” attached. The establishment of a study abroad program and the resulting cross-cultural construction of an “experience” for students involuntarily brings cultural borders into the homestay, the classroom, experiential learning contexts, and into every intercultural interaction. Scholars agree that borders and boundaries surpass political economy, and include these cultural contexts in their definitions as well (Foley, 1995): “A border is not a neutral demarcation line. It is a symbol of power that imposes inclusion and exclusion. The more privileged dominant, hegemonious side will actively control the border to keep border-crossers out” (Chang, 1999). Chang also discusses borderlands as a space where “ethnic groups actively fuse and blend their culture with a wider mainstream culture.” Thus, international education should focus not only on the “borderlands” of countries that students visit and learn about, but self-study the less physical but equally political “borders” which are an externality of study abroad for all individuals and communities involved.

Borders are a unique space to learn about others and oneself as these spaces function as “contact zones” (Pratt, 1991). Both Chang and Pratt indicate highly rigid power structures as a key facet of contact zones, yet Reilly and Senders (2009) contend that in these spaces, “the ‘lines’ between self and the other, between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ between ‘ours’ and ‘theirs,’ begin to look less sure and less necessary” (p. 252). This makes borders an especially interesting learning environment as they put both privileged and marginalized communities in a place to question their identity in relation to one another and participate in a dynamic cultural exchange. Pratt (1991) concludes her analysis with a summary of the educational goals of one her courses: “Our job … remains to figure out how to make that crossroad the best site for learning that it can be. We are looking for the pedagogical arts of the contact zone.” Developing the pedagogical arts of the contact zone could lead to increased transformation: students can develop clarity of positioning, a dedication to reciprocity, and skills for empathy. Some of the “arts of the contact zone” she lists include storytelling, experiments in transculturation, parody, and the development of ways to move in and out of rhetorics of authenticity. Though her course is part of a US-based university curriculum, she clearly understands how a course can simultaneously study the broader concept of “contact zones” and participate in in-class experimentation. In this paper, I

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also intend to go beyond the topical “borders” that Reilly and Senders (2009) describe11 and integrate them as part of the discourse on international education.

ConclusionIn this study, I will explore the meaning of transformation within the context of international education and dig into its relationship with cross-cultural contact. In my Literature Review, I will introduce the reader to the existing research on this topic by describing academia’s shifting frames of analysis, exploring the role of the individual in contact and the individual outcomes of contact, and characterizing each of the three social networks developed by Bochner et al.: monocultural, bicultural, and multicultural. I will conclude the Literature Review with shortcomings and suggest places for future exploration.

The Theory chapter will introduce and explore the work of several theoreticians including Allport, Pettigrew, Buber, Rawls, and others. I will look at my research question from both a psychological standpoint and a theological standpoint, with a dash of political science on the side. The issues of process versus outcome, individual versus systemic transformation and responsibility, and justice versus justification will be analyzed. The chapter will conclude with a critique of study abroad based on the work of the aforementioned authors.

The Methods chapter of this study will describe the research methodology and survey design. I will implement a version of the 1977 survey by Bochner et al. and in the Methods chapter I will describe the research tool and its development process. In the Findings chapter, I will report the resulting data. The Discussion chapter will frame the quantitative results within theory, supplement with qualitative data, and then generate a new model for cross-cultural contact abroad. In the Conclusion, I will review the main points of the present study and offer recommendations for practitioners and scholars involved in this field.

11 “Critical study abroad calls upon educators to embrace a complex view of culture, identity, and locality, and to recognize the pedagogical value of the contact zone. In practical terms, this means reorganizing our work to include border studies, and to illuminate the ways that the ongoing process of bordering takes place even in national centers” (p. 253).

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II.LiteratureReview:PositioningInterculturalContactinStudyAbroad In this section, I will introduce the reader to previous research on study abroad, cross-cultural contact, and transformation. First, I will present material regarding the unique context within which we understand study abroad today, and provide examples of shifting frameworks of inquiry across disciplines. In this section, the reader will learn about the role of privilege, globalization, and institutions in the individual study abroad experience, as well as their current trends and implications will be investigated. Following, I will focus on the general relationship between intercultural contact and international education. The functional friendship pattern networks described by Bochner et al. (primary monocultural, secondary bicultural, tertiary multicultural) will be used as an organizational device to present information about student relationships within the peer group, the host culture, and the “third culture.” The study by Bochner et al. that is the foundation of the present study’s empirical research will be discussed at length as will my Junior independent study (Valencia, 2011). To conclude the literature review, I will offer a critique of the published research to date and put forward potential new directions.

ShiftingframeworksofinquirySome scholars argue that individual and societal transformation through international education is more than a “positive outcome”: it is an imperative part of the global project to create a just and sustainable shared future. Study abroad has transcended its historical legacies of class reproduction, idealistic internationalism, political internationalism, and global competence, but its potential has not been realized (Reilly & Senders, 2009). There is a vital need for study abroad, and it is even more pressing in the 21st century:

[Study abroad] will allow our students to bear witness to a changing world; testify to the sacrifice of traditional cultures pushed economically to conform; see and live, while time still allows, other ways of organizing society, of solving problems, of conducting human relations; preserve in some small, respectful way their legacy (Engle & Engle, 2002, p. 38).

Doug Reilly and Stefan Senders echo this feeling with a proposed “Critical Study Abroad” model, which invites international education practitioners and participants to accept the responsibility of wholly engaging with global crises. Critical Study Abroad calls upon students and providers to see study abroad as an arena that is not isolated but integrated within the local and global contexts. It is an “activist force in the service of global survival” that will be part of a larger epistemological inquiry. The diagram below demonstrates Reilly & Senders nine trends for the development of a model of study abroad that goes above and beyond in answering issues of global crisis.

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These nine elements mirror the nine habits of a University of Minnesota Studies in International Development program alumnus, as cited in the Introduction. Shifting the rhetoric from one of internationalism to one of human solidarity will allow students to develop the first habit, which is to think, feel, and act holistically. The cognitive habits meant to be developed are outputs of a study abroad experience that examines contemporary culture, studies the “borders,” and focuses on the relationship of humans to their environment. The chief affective habit, cultivating empathy, is an outcome of learning to value the local and an emphasis on responsibility that comes with privilege. The habits associated with the behavioral dimension, fostering community and translating insights and values into action, mirror the larger behavioral trends Reilly and

1. Shift the rhetoric: spaceship earth: The field of international education should shift from the rhetoric of “internationality” which is “prosaic, instrumental, nationalistic” to one of human solidarity (p. 251).

2. Study the “borders”: Critical study abroad needs to “embrace a complex view of culture, identity, and locality, and to recognize the pedagogical value of the contact zone.”

3. Value the local: Students should “come to understand the power of local action and struggle, and moreover, come to see themselves as impacting local communities, an awareness surprisingly rare among students…. Conceive of everyone as stakeholders” (p. 253).

4. Examine contemporary culture: Programs should move away from “static, reductionist, and idealized notions of culture” towards sensitization of students to “dynamic relations among local groups and interests” (p. 254).

5. Empower and inspire students to action: Programs such as ‘participatory action research’ shifts roles from researcher and subject to collaborators and co-researchers, in which both are “equally responsible, equally powerful, and that the knowledge produced to be deliberately shaped to benefit the community” (p. 256).

6. Emphasize responsibility: Students should consider “not only what they have been given, but also what they owe” (257). Shift from the culture of consumption to the culture of responsibility. Reject ‘global competence,’ which has ties to national identity and interest, and embrace ‘global citizenship,’ which respects the value of local community and human solidarity.

7. Pose study abroad as a search for solutions: “Sensitized to examine culture within social, historical, economic and particularly environmental frameworks, students will be encouraged to ‘bring back’ with them not just photo-albums, journals and memories, but examples of how local cultures respond to the challenges we all face” (p. 259).

8. Focus on the relationship of humans to their environment: “By examining both inter-human and human-environmental relationships as two linked dynamics, we can assemble a picture of the current moment of crisis that is richer and more complex, more pragmatic and relevant” (p. 259).

9. Encourage student-led learning and teaching: “Develop students’ abilities to teach themselves and others, to create active and responsible educational participants” (p. 260). (Reilly & Senders 2009)

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Senders call for, empowering and inspiring students to action, posing study abroad as a search for solutions and encouraging student-led teaching and learning.

Figure 2: Institutional goals and individual change as reflected on the ABC model for Acculturation (Ward et al. 2001)

Janet M. Bennett, author of “On Becoming a Global Soul” (2008), also gives a path to

engagement during study abroad, following the model of categorizing competencies as affective, behavioral, and cognitive dimensions. She terms the cognitive competencies the “mindset,” the behavioral competencies the “skillset,” and the affective competencies the “heartset.” Though she acknowledges that there are many variables that affect study abroad outcomes that cannot be controlled, to her, there are five clear trends that can be (p. 21). These five trends can be comparatively analyzed with Reilly and Senders’ nine elements. Bennett’s trends include:

1. Campuses are recognizing that a bridge can be built between domestic diversity and

global learning. 2. International education is recognizing that comprehensive design is essential. 3. Study abroad programs must be intentionally developmentally designed. 4. The assessment of intercultural competence is part of our developmental work. 5. International education will assume its rightful place at the core of global learning.

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Bennett’s analysis brings study abroad back into the academic realm by connecting international education to on-campus education. She also approaches international education from a conceptual level, posing trends for its design rather than just for its execution. Lastly, Bennett places international education in the larger context of “global learning.” While she notes fewer trends than Reilly and Senders, her breadth of analysis is greater. However, Reilly and Senders isolate elements that have a stronger connection to the habits presented previously. While Bennett does appear stuck in the rhetoric that Reilly and Senders eschew (such as the usage of the word “competence”), neither of the arguments invalidate the other; instead they offer distinct points of view from which the future of international education can be understood. Moving from the institutional to the individual level of analysis, Reilly and Senders bring up another important point in their article: study abroad its related positive outcomes are a function of privilege. For many US college students, the price of international education is too high – be it the academic, financial, social, or cultural challenges that intervene. Additionally, the sample of students with access to study abroad shrinks to an almost miniscule size upon contextualizing it within national and global access to higher education.12 Though over 260,000 U.S. students studied abroad for credit in 2008/09, totaling more than triple the number two decades ago (Chow & Bhandari, 2010, p. 18), this represents only 1.27% of the total higher education enrollment of 20.4 million students.13 The one-in-one-hundred American students who have both the desire and the means to study abroad are among a privileged few, in both the global and the national context. The field of international education must remember that while its goals and objectives are global and growing, the scale to which they can be actualized is limited to the population of people who have access to the luxury good of study abroad.

Furthermore, U.S. American students who go abroad take their privilege with them even beyond their on-campus circles: when off-campus, especially in non-Western host cultures, the privilege of being an American can have even greater influence. Though American economic and cultural hegemony is in flux, the average student’s purchasing power in dollars, ability to speak English as a first language, hand-holding study abroad program, and even the likely birthright of fair skin give the student abroad baggage that no “overweight limit” can regulate. This is especially true for the population of students who choose to go to Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East, which in 2008/09 made up more than one in three students abroad. Robert Selby reflected on this during his time in Mexico: “The Mexico I knew existed on in the imagination of a foreigner, an outsider left on his own to observe and interpret an apparently convivial Mexico without ever sensing its rigid social norms that isolated class from class, family from family, coworker from colleague ” (2008, p. 5). In many ways, American students abroad have access to their host country in a way that no local ever could. This places American students in a unique place of power, but a study abroad industry that merely asks students to observe and analyze their power will not end up “Being the change we want to see in the world” as Reilly and Senders named their article. Students must go beyond trying to “preserve in some small, respectful way” (Engle & Engle, 2002) the legacies of their host culture. Instead, there is a need for reciprocal, whole, and empathetic cross-cultural

12 According to UNESCO, in 2009 there were more than 207 million post-secondary aged people in the world. In 2009, 27% of the global population who were of the tertiary-education age group reported as being enrolled, according to a UNESCO Institute for Statistics estimate (UIS Online Database). 13 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2011). Digest of Education Statistics, 2010 (NCES 2011-015

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encounters that will meet the responsibility inherited from privilege. To conclude, while scholars have a heightened awareness of the social need for positive study abroad outcomes, such as increased empathy, reduced prejudice, and behavioral change, there is still an overwhelming need to understand the method for achieving authentic cross-cultural encounter. The following sections will delve deeply into the existing literature on the state of intercultural contact for American students abroad.

InterculturalcontactininternationaleducationJust as temporality and academic goals differentiate international education from other categories of “sojourns,” intercultural contact differentiates international education from at-home education. According to Allport’s contact hypothesis, contact with the host culture is one of the most important aspects of international education, especially in terms of student transformation (Allport 1954; Pettigrew 1998, 2011). However, the literature also seems to agree that a student’s mere presence abroad will not be transformative: the “magic” isn’t there; there is no “alchemy somehow activated by the sheer fact of being abroad” (Savicki, 2011; Citron, 2002; Engle & Engle, 2002). Cultural contact in and of itself will not have a high impact, as cultural knowledge does not equal cultural competence and language learning is not always sufficient for culture learning (Bennett, 2008). More is required: “Being ‘global souls’ – seeing ourselves as members of a world community, knowing that we share the future with others – requires not only intercultural experience but also the capacity to engage that experience as transformative” (p. 13). Before globalization, there was more credibility to the argument that a student’s mere presence abroad would change his or her life (Engle & Engle, 2002, p. 27); however, in today’s highly connected context it is easy to imagine a life lived physically abroad but mentally at home. As no two students are the same, relationships with the host culture, personal development over the course of the period, or experiences of intercultural contact vary depending on the individual. However, some overarching theories of acculturation and intercultural contact have been developed. In the theory section of this paper, I will further discuss each theory and how they connect to one another. Presently, however, it is important to introduce their basics, as they will shape how I organize this literature review. As already introduced, one concrete way of measuring intercultural contact is through analyzing cross-group friendship patterns. Stephen Bochner et al. (1977) developed and provided an empirical check for a functional model of the social networks of sojourners. In the following pages, I will first discuss what individual characteristics affect a sojourner’s level and quality of intercultural contact. Following this, I will discuss the various networks put forward in the functional model developed by Bochner et al. and the existing literature that supports his theory.

Me,myself&I:Individualinfluencesonhost‐culturecontactIndividual-level characteristics of the sojourner impact the relationship and interaction between the sojourner and the hosting culture. Many studies have been published about “who” studies abroad and “who” does not (Stroud, 2010). In her study “Who plans (not) to study abroad? An examination of U.S. student intent,” April H. Stroud shows that the “most likely” person to study abroad is a female who feels it is important to improve their understanding of other countries and cultures and already lives more than 100 miles from their hometown. Those who plan to go to graduate school, are intending to major in engineering or professional areas such as architecture or medicine, or are living with their family are unlikely to go abroad. Through this self-selection, students who go abroad already begin to form a homogenous group. However, their relationship

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to the host culture is differentiated by individual-level factors such as years of language study, weeks of foreign travel, previous foreign exchange, having friends from different ethnicities, and ethnic emphasis at home (Savicki & Cooley, 2011). Additionally, certain personality traits correlate to a student’s comfort with host culture contact: “More outgoing, stress tolerant, persistent students who find it easier to get along with others, and who look for new experiences show higher levels of host culture contact” (p. 75). Many individual-level factors influence a person’s relationship to the host culture while abroad, some of which can be generalized to the group of students as a whole. Sixty-five percent of U.S. study abroad participants are female, and over 80% are White (Chow & Bhandari, 2010). For most White U.S. American students, a shift from majority to minority status will be entirely new challenge: “Some White study abroad students, when asked to discuss their home culture, have replied ‘I don’t have a culture.’ With majority status and without a different, dominant culture for comparison, these students had not examined the aspect of their identity related to their culture of origin, American” (Savicki & Cooley 2011, p. 341). Going to a foreign country for many people is the first time when they must confront their identity as an American, and for those who go outside of Europe and Australia, as an ethnic minority.14 Unfortunately, the literature does not support the hope that U.S. American students increase their exploration of U.S. American identity while abroad (p. 345). Instead, scholars argue that students abroad find familiarity in the Americanizing host culture, which informs the confident notion of the “worldwide acceptability” of American values, and culture (Engle & Engle, 2002). In their article, “Neither International nor Educative: Study Abroad in the Time of Globalization,” Engle and Engle (2002) discuss values esteemed in U.S. American culture that may negatively impact students abroad, highlighting the difference between sympathy and empathy. While sympathetic individuals will tolerate cultural differences with the understanding that “in the end, we are all the same,” empathy goes beyond tolerance by accepting, supporting, and seeing validity in other worldviews. Americans tend towards sympathy over empathy. Engle and Engle find that in the globalized arena of international education,

Having spent their lives internalizing [American] cultural values that then seem in various ways and forms reflected back at them, even abroad, many students lack motivation to scratch beneath the surface and discover what is so precious about the successful foreign sojourn, that is, authentic encounters with other ways of being and thinking (31).

14 As a fair-skinned, North American woman in India, I had to “own” my identity day in and out, whether it meant being a spokesperson for women’s rights to a non-profit organization, for U.S. American foreign policy to a rickshaw driver, or for Western pop music to my host sisters. Political discussion varied from highly intellectual and sophisticated to random cat-calls of “Obama!” from bikers.

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In his theory of acculturation, Berry (1997) isolates two aspects of cross-cultural exchange: the maintenance of original cultural identity and the contact and participation with other groups. Berry argues that there are four acculturation15 strategies: assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization. Each of these reflects the proportion of importance of cultural maintenance to the degree of contact with the diverse groups in the foreign society. The four factors that affect the process of acculturation, and thus the development of affective, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes, are interpersonal and inter-group interactions, with special focus on friendship networks; difficulties experienced by academic sojourners; academic issues in the intercultural classroom; the impact of cultural stereotypes on cross-cultural contact. The ideal

combination is a high maintenance of one’s own identity while a high participation in the host culture, or “integration.” A student’s background will influence their likelihood to integrate into the host culture: for example, students with above average or below average disposable incomes were less likely to integrate than the average-income student (Citron, 2002). Personality factors also contribute to acculturation, regardless of host-cultural norms: personality traits that increase the likelihood of a healthy adaptation include extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and less neuroticism, as demonstrated in a study on the “Big Five” personality dimensions and sojourners (Ward, Leong, & Low, 2004). Aside from their behavior during the foreign sojourn, a student’s individual-level characteristics will influence where they choose to study abroad and what type of program they choose. This self-selection often creates fairly homogenous groups. In my program in India, I noticed an interesting trend in the program participants, which were 85% female and 95% White. Over the semester, it became clear to me that while at home each individual was the “boldest” of their social circle, with a unique interest in International Development, in India we were nothing more than a cohort of the “boldest.” These sort of individual-level characteristics, which may influence intent to study abroad and create a self-selected group, when put in the abroad context, become generalizable across the peer cohort group.

Me,myself,&allmyfriends:SocialnetworksandsojournersBochner et al. described social networks as “a core phenomenon [that] affects practically all of the sojourner's social relations and attitudes” (1977, p. 268). They are also a key piece to this research as they are my method for capturing empathy, clarity of positioning, and reciprocal

15 “Acculturation process, which encompass the many changes that occur when people from differing cultures come into contact with each other, can be observed among a wide range of people in addition to immigrants, such as refugees forced to leave their home countries, people living abroad as foreign students or as employees of international companies, and aboriginal peoples dealing with the encroachment of other cultures” (Phinney, p. xx).

Figure 3: Berry's theory of acculturation (1997), based on Figure 3.3 from Sam & Berry (2008)

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relationships. Friendship networks are usually tied into the “affective” aspect of study abroad, but are linked to outcomes in all aspects of the ABC model. The way that I am measuring them in this research is actually more related to behavior, and is based on the original work by Bochner et al. They developed a functional model relating to this phenomenon in 1977, presented in their paper “Friendship Patterns for Overseas Students: A Functional Model.” The model was later revisited by Adrian Furnham and Naznin Alibhai in 1985 in their article “The Friendship Networks of Foreign Students: A Replication and Extension of the Functional Model.” Both of these research papers sampled foreign students living in a Western context, with the first study taking place at the University of Hawaii and the second in London. Students from the global community pursuing a degree in this context presumably will go primarily for an academic experience, and the functional models were based around this understanding. However, American students who study abroad are more likely to be oriented towards cross-cultural exposure, developing foreign language skills, or to “see the world.” While foreign students living in the US may spend their breaks employed in work-study positions, American students abroad are likely to design their class schedule around exploratory weekend travels. This demonstrates an important difference between the sample in the 1977 and 1985 studies and the sample represented in the present study. The article “Friendship patterns of overseas students: A functional model,” was originally published in the International Journal of Psychology by Bochner, MacLeod, and Lin in 1977, included a sample of 30 University of Hawaii students, with international students balanced for gender from five countries and a control group of domestic students. The aim of their study was to predict intra- and inter-cultural friendship patterns of foreign students by understanding the different functions that those friendships serve. They hypothesize that sojourners will have three distinct social networks. As Furnham and Alibhai (1985) summarize, students will develop:

(1) A primary, mono-cultural network, consisting of close friendships with other sojourning compatriots. The main function of the co-national network is to provide a setting in which ethnic and cultural values can be rehearsed and expressed. (2) A secondary, bi-cultural network, consisting of bonds between sojourners and significant host nationals such as academics, students, advisers, and government officials. The main function of this network is to facilitate instrumentally the academic and professional aspirations of the sojourner. (3) A third, multicultural network of friends and acquaintances. The main function of this network is to provide companionship for recreational, 'non-cultural' and non-task orientated activities.

Bochner et al. conducted the survey at the University of Hawaii in an international dorm setting. Exchange students from Japan, Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, and the Philippines, along with a control group of host nationals, completed in a three-part survey. First, they identified their closest friends in Hawaii, who could be co-residents of the international dorm, classmates, or anyone from outside the university. Then, they identified the five people they spent the most time with, and noted if any of these people were the same as those from the first list. In the final part of the survey, the students identified which real (not hypothetical) individuals they would prefer as a companion for each of a list of fifteen activities. The list included activities such as getting academic help, shopping, and playing sports. When the survey participant preferred not to participate in the activity, not to respond to the survey question, or complete the activity alone,

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they were requested to indicate as such. Adrian Furnham and Naznin Alibhai replicated this survey, but with a different sample. Instead of using 30 students balanced for gender and nationality, they surveyed 165 students—all living in London but attending different universities. The students were from over 30 countries and included 25 British controls. They were not balanced for gender and included 96 males and 69 females. Furnham and Alibhai also used the residence halls as a base point for sampling, as did Bochner et al. Instead of a three-part survey, they included only the best friends checklist and the activities checklist. Furnham and Alibhai’s research provides a positive check on the results from Bochner et al. Activities relevant to cultural rehearsal or affirming cultural values (i.e. cooking) or others of a deeply personal nature (i.e. emotional support) fall into the primary mono-cultural social network. Activities of a utilitarian nature (i.e. language help or academic help) fall into the secondary bi-cultural network between the sojourner and the host culture. Recreational, culturally non-specific activities fall into a third multicultural network.

In the spring of 2011, I conducted a directed research thesis to fulfill the requirements of my academic year study abroad program, University of Minnesota Studies in International Development (MSID). The program was based in Jaipur, Rajasthan and at the time I was living in Udaipur, Rajasthan (India). I based my research on the functional framework and methodology of psychologists Bochner, MacLeod, and Lin. In my research, I adapted the model for a non-Western study abroad context, administered the survey instrument to 45 foreigners living in Rajasthan, and analyzed the results as they related to the original functional model developed by Bochner et al. I adapted this methodology by including India-specific activities, relevant demographic information, and section on life satisfaction. My final sample included 36 students who were living in Rajasthan either through an academic program, a fellowship, or an internship. My results confirmed the functional model described by Bochner et al. A primary, mono-cultural network did emerge, alongside a secondary, bi-cultural network. Because of the nature of my sample, I slightly modified the original model and categorized individuals as either “Indians” or “Non-Indians.” In my research, the activities for which non-Indians are preferred involve social support and cultural exploration. Interestingly, same-culture companions are preferred for other-cultural events such as going to see a local site. Indians are preferred for functional activities, such as medical, academic, or language-related help. They are preferred when they are “gatekeepers” – Indians are usually the only ones able to drive, and are therefore an important component in “driving around town.” The only strong preference for being alone is while “doing homework.” For several activities, there is a strong non-preference for having a certain companion. “Getting support for personal or emotional problems,” “Just talking,” and “Just being” are the three most intimate interpersonal activities, for which Indians are highly non-preferred. In fact, most people do not only prefer to be with a non-Indian over being with an Indian, they actually prefer being alone over being with an Indian. The following figure (Figure 4) reports friendship patterns (based on friend nationality) from the Bochner et al. (1977), Furnham and Alibhai (1985), and Valencia (2011) surveys. For each of Bochner’s functional networks, the preferred activities for group members are listed as reported in survey results. The next table (Table 1) gives a more in-depth representation of the preferred activities based on the sample’s orientation for a conational, host national, or other national companion.

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Figure 4: Comparing friendship patterns in Bochner et al. (1977), Furnham & Alibhai (1985), and Valencia (2011)

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Table 1: Valencia (2011) Companionship Preferences

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In the study done by Bochner et al., friendship patterns indicated a strong preference for same-culture friendships, as 44% of the total friendships were with co-nationals, 32% with other nationals, and the remaining 24% with host nationals (p. 283). In Furnham and Alibhai’s study, 54% of friends listed were co-nationals, 28% were other nationals, and 18% were host nationals. In my research, of the total friendships listed, 74% were co-nationals or other nationals and only 16% were host nationals. In fact, on their list of “five closest friends,” 17 of 34 respondents reported having no Indian friends (see table on right). There was not a single respondent who reported having no co-cultural friends, except for a respondent who reported having no friends at all. This general trend frames the three functional networks described by Bochner et al., which I will now individually describe using supporting research.

ThePrimaryNetwork:MonoculturalsupportMost students on an official program enjoy the company of at least a dozen study abroad companions. The peer cohort gives a support system, an opportunity for knowledge sharing, a stage for cultural rehearsal, and a promise of continued interaction upon repatriation. Even students who do not go abroad on a formal program and instead directly enroll in an internship or academic program will cross paths with other co-nationals: be it while searching for comfort food in local import shops, due to a blind date arranged by host mothers (a true story), or at a cultural event. In some ways, contact with the peer cohort can be an escape: “In the sink-or-swim challenge of local integration, sink most do, into the foreign student bar, reassuringly anonymous traveling, parallel worlds furnished comfortably with familiar cultural symbols” (Engle & Engle, 2002, 34). However, when paired with a high amount of host culture contact, “contact with other American students, in and of itself, may not be problematic” (Savicki, 2011).16 I would go even further to state that contact with the peer cohort enhances the contact with the host culture when managed ideally: “A community of fellow foreigners to share their experience with while it is occurring is more than a coping technique, it provides a space for dialogue and peer learning that can play a valuable role in acculturation and identity-formation in the host country” (Valencia, 2011). Additionally, the peer cohort can expose students to American diversity as students from other institutions across the US may be classmates. Many aspects of the culture of studying abroad foster contact with the peer cohort: group living in host families and apartments, intensive orientations, weekend travel, and other shared experiences are all natural parts of the international experience. However, for as much as grouping can enhance the study abroad experience, and allow it to continue on even upon repatriation, in the host culture context, it can act more often as a crutch: “Grouping shields the individual from the discomfort of host culture and language contact, while travel serves up a comfortingly neutral, generally English-speaking world” (Engle & Engle, 2002, p. 29). Traveling especially acts as an escape into a world where the students’ own “terms” become a common currency. While grouping is often seen as a natural process, one that programs must proactively

16 In my personal experience, an important part of my acculturation process was conversation and deliberation with co-nationals, during which I could process what I was observing and absorbing, ask questions and talk through conundrums, and serve as a sounding board for fellow co-nationals.

Number of friends host nationals

Frequency of Responses (N=34)

0 out of 5 17 (50%) 1 out of 5 5 (15%) 2 out of 5 7 (21%) 3 out of 5 4 (12%) 4 out of 5 1 (3%) 5 out of 5 0 (0%) Table 2: Valencia (2011) friendship patterns

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counteract, some argue that “the structure of many programs may inadvertently encourage students to spend more time with other U.S. students than with the host culture natives” (Citron, 2002, p. 41). According to one scholar, programs exist that “explicitly downplay language learning and negotiation of difference in favor of a ‘coming of age’ model explicitly encouraging in-group solidarity and rejection of local social networks” (Kinginger, 2009). This trend is tied to negative study abroad outcomes, as higher rates of contact with the peer cohort are related to lower measures of satisfaction with life, positive affect, and sociocultural adaptation (Savicki, 2011). As I found in personal experience while abroad in both Argentina and India, and as noted in the literature, the peer cohort will retain a culture neither distinctly “American” nor adopt a culture that is purely reflective of the host culture. Instead, a “third culture” will be formed (Citron, 2002). In a globalizing world, students who go abroad are more so traveling a cultural spectrum rather than removing themselves from one culture and inserting themselves in another (Citron, 2002, p. 41). As Engle and Engle argued, this may be an even more complex transition than the previously existing binary one. In the “third culture,” students appropriate aspects of the host culture that are particularly appealing, but put a home-culture spin on them:

Foreigners living in Rajasthan develop a culture that is neither completely Western nor completely Indian. They wear their own style of Indian clothes, eat their own assortment of Indian food, use their own vocabulary of Indian slang, have their own style of Indian décor in their program offices, and have their own type of Indian ‘family’ (Valencia, 2011).

Instead of evaluating their experience or understanding their context on the terms of the host culture, students with a strong “third culture” element will continue to understand their surroundings through a strong ethnocentric mindset. Instead of referring to local cultural nuances as favorite aspects of their study abroad experience, they will choose contact with symbols of U.S. culture as a highlight (Citron, 2002). This could mean going to a concert by an American band touring abroad, finding a special food particular to their home culture in the abroad setting, or funny aspects of their American culture as translated onto their host culture’s stage. When they go home, these memories are what students retain and communicate to their family and friends, as they are easily relatable in the home-cultural context. In spite of its benefits, the gravitational “third culture” can at times act as more of a crutch for students than a jumping-off point: “When confronted by different cultural practices, instead of adjusting by struggling to understand them, students chose to adjust by simply disregarding them and forming a third culture of their peers” (Citron, 2002, p. 51). The group mentality can lead to “unchanged, even flagrantly American behavior” (Engle & Engle, 2002, p. 30). Indeed, “if we seek transformative learning as a goal of international education, we need to facilitate the exploration and search aspect of American Identity” (Hunter, 2008 in Savicki & Cooley, 2011, p. 348), but not through the belting out of fight songs in the wee hours of the morning on a Barcelona bar crawl (Citron, 2002).

TheSecondaryNetwork:BiculturalutilityContact with the host culture takes place most frequently within the students’ living accommodations, in daily situations in the host culture community, and through speaking the host culture language outside of formal language classes (Savicki, 2011). Higher host culture contact correlates to more positive study abroad outcomes: “Students who are more inclusively

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integrated with the local community do better in their studies; tend to be more satisfied with their sojourn; are less anxious; and report higher self-esteem (Ward & Kennedy, 1993a &b, as cited in Bochner, 2006). These affective and behavioral outcomes are accompanied by cognitive outcomes: “Students with higher percentages of host culture contact were most likely to be able to modulate their emotional response to acculturative stressors, and were more able to think through cultural difficulties in a creative fashion” (Savicki, 2011, p.75). Interestingly, there is also a noted increase in home culture identity as a result of contact with the host culture (Berry, 2005).

In my previous research, I tested the dependent variable “Rate association and friendship with host nationals” against the independent variables of Program, Program duration*17, Gender, NGO work, Involvement in academics, Group status, Plans to live abroad in the future, Satisfaction with working at NGO*, Overall satisfaction with living in India*, and Hindi Confidence*. Concerning program duration, I found that between the one-semester students and the two-semester students, the association rate doubles and the friendship rate nearly triples. Reported satisfaction with NGO work and overall life were strongly correlated to higher association and friendship rates (see Table 3).

Rate of Association/

Friendship with Indians1

Reported Satisfaction NGO Work N=27

Overall N=34

Very unsatisfied 20% n/a Unsatisfied 31% n/a Neutral 33% n/a Satisfied 43% 26% Very Satisfied 50% 52% Table 3: Valencia (2011) Association patterns & NGO work Table 4: Friendship Patterns & Hindi

Students who work at an NGO (27 out of 34 respondents) are not more likely to associate

with Indians than others, but those who indicate increased satisfaction with their work had increased association (see Table 4). It is difficult to determine in these relationships if there is reverse causality, meaning that those who associate more with Indian nationals and have more Indian friends are more satisfied, rather than vice versa. The last independent variable that demonstrated a strong correlation to association and friendship with Indians was confidence in spoken Hindi. Of the 136 “close friends” listed by 34 program respondents, only 1 friend was reported as speaking no English at all. Therefore, in the sample, only one participant made friends with a non-English-speaking Indian and that person only made one non-English-speaking friend.

17 * = I found notable patterns for these variables and elaborated on them in my paper, though I did not test for statistical significance

Confidence in Hindi

Rate of Association with Indians

Rate of Friendship with Indians

None 26% 14% Low 36% 27% Medium 44% 32% High 46% 33%

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My results demonstrated that the landscape of intercultural contact in Rajasthan, India yields a disappointing quantity of intergroup association and friendships. One would assume that those in my sample would have a heightened interest in local culture due to their dedication to social work, but this does not prove to be the case. It is demonstrated that students who stay longer, are more satisfied, and are able to speak the local language have more intercultural contact than their counterparts. However, even these students do not show any remarkable dedication to intercultural friendships. The results from my previous research provide a reality-check for my current research, confirming that intercultural interaction needs to improve in both quantity and quality. Until relationships with the host culture surpass mere “functionality,” just, equitable, and transformative experiences abroad are limited. Host-culture contact in the 21st century is performed on an entirely different stage than even ten years prior. Engle & Engle (2002) argue that Americanization abroad makes host-culture contact more, not less, confusing for sojourners: “Students find themselves caught between contradictory messages about cultural difference … When they find themselves abroad facing both superficial sameness and, beneath it, tinklings of fundamental, troubling cultural difference, our students need the kind of in-depth cultural guidance that, unfortunately, far too few overseas programs are structured to provide” (p. 28). Because of this heightened necessity for navigating complex cultural realities and the general lack of support for doing so, a dually troublesome situation develops in that “[cultural] differences are less visible to the unguided or unprepared, and it has without doubt become considerably easier to skate smoothly above them” (p. 27). Contact with the host culture can be transformative and authentic at best, superficial and slightly contrived on average, and downright injurious at worst. The literature reflects how students are transformed by their contact with the host culture. However it does little reflection on how the culture of the students and the introduction of a foreign institution into a community affect the host culture community itself. Studies that survey host families, local businesses, or organizations hosting interns about the impact of the contact with foreigners would give insight to this side of the equation (Kinginger, 2009). Instead, these actors are treated as the “independent variable” upon which the variable “student transformation” or “study abroad outcome” depends. In some ways, the research treats the host culture in the same way that academics worry students will: as an “exotic setting, a contrasting background” (Engle & Engle, 2002), “an exotic fantasy playground” (Kinginger, 2009), upon which to observe quintessential scenes of Americana. One paper touches on this question that many fail to by observing that “it may no longer simply be a question of students resisting fundamental changes in cultural attitude and behavior but of them proactively imposing their cultural references upon their host environment” (Engle & Engle, 2002, p. 30). However, even in this inquiry, the students remain the subject while the local setting is objectified. These themes will be further investigated in the theory chapter of this work. Contact with the host culture is not the only ingredient necessary for a transformative study abroad experience. While it certainly is important, and increased contact with the host culture results in positive study abroad outcomes, it is not the only facilitating factor. Additionally, in the 21st century, a confusing array of overlapping and incongruous messages about what is “home culture” and what is “host culture” provide students with an even more challenging arena for cross-cultural navigation. Finally, “host culture contact” continues to be considered only from the students’ point of view. In some ways, the research itself continues to self-reflect on its own terms, rather than on the terms of the host culture. As Citron (2002)

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suggests, “To maximize opportunities for cultural integration and learning, international educators can strive to have students meet … needs on the host culture’s terms rather than on the home culture’s terms.” What would scholarship on intercultural contact look like from the inside out rather than the outside in?

TheTertiaryNetwork:MulticulturalrecreationThe tertiary network is a multicultural network whose purpose is recreation, according to Bochner et al. In their sample of foreigners living in Hawaii, and Furnham and Alibhai’s sample of international students in London, an international network is built into the campus social life. This is somewhat prevalent in countries where American students become “international students” (direct enrollment programs) but in island, hybrid, or experiential programs, the only foreigners a student may know are those who are in his or her program. Therefore, the tertiary network is less relevant to this study than to studies with a nationally diverse sample. However, Citron’s “third culture” has the potential to approximate the tertiary network when modified to be multicultural, as I will now propose. I would expand the “third culture” to include members of the host culture who have experienced the sojourners’ home culture. Citron’s description of the “third culture” is one that students create abroad that is neither host nor home cultural. However, this “third culture” is not monocultural! As an American living in Argentina, my closest friends were Argentine youths who were recent returnees from the US. One had been an exchange student in Pennsylvania and the other in Wisconsin. Our friendship was neither purely Argentine nor purely American in nature, as it was fuelled by cultural references regarding both the US and Argentina, bilingual puns, shared personality traits, and a common sense of cross-cultural adventure. With these two students, I voiced my observations of the host culture and reflected on experiences of “An American in Argentina” to a sympathetic and forgiving host-culture peanut gallery. Simultaneously, I had the opportunity to enjoy their stories of “An Argentine in America” (perhaps more than many of their co-national friends and family could). Five years later, I have not forgotten how important returnee students were to my experience in Argentina, and continue to make a point of welcoming Argentine and South American communities in the U.S.

Citron does not include the community of returnees in his third culture, but in my experience they have been a central element, not only in terms of their role in the third culture, but in their ability to bridge the gap between the third culture and the host culture. Oftentimes, the contact with returnees opens up an entirely new social circle, where foreign students are authentically welcomed as friends of friends. Additionally, Savicki’s category of “other nationals” often influences the third culture. While abroad in Argentina, I learned not only about Argentina but also about Belgium, France, Denmark, Brazil, and even other regions of the United States because of the diversity in my social group of international exchange students. In some ways, I question whether “place” is an important determinant of the third culture. Upon repatriation, third-culture rehearsal may occur with American friends who lived in other places abroad. An American student who lived in rural Thailand may find commonalities with an American student who lived in rural Bangladesh more than one who lived in urban Thailand. Similarly, American, Belgian, Danish, and South African students have an inclusive social group during the foreign sojourn.

To conclude, even though the tertiary network is not as relevant in the present study as it was in the 1977 study of international students at the University of Hawaii and the 1985 study of international students at multiple universities in London, a recreational multicultural network

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does exist in a modified version of Citron’s “third culture.” The modifications proposed shift the third culture from a crutch to a jumping-off-point for cross-cultural interaction.

CritiqueoftheliteratureThe literature included in this review has a broad scope in terms of content but not in terms of sample. Scholars analyze study abroad from many different theoretical viewpoints and analyze intercultural contact on many different levels. However, there are some points of analysis left out. First, the literature focuses on students who go abroad to Western countries. The articles that I am reviewing have samples located in London, France, Australia, the US, and other Western countries. There is anecdotal evidence about students in non-Western countries, but I did not find an article that reviews intercultural contact and personal transformation as it relates to a non-Western study abroad destination. This severely limits my research, as my greatest interest is in students who go abroad and find themselves a privileged ethnic minority for the first time and their lived experiences with negotiating difference, which will be represented in the conceptual variable related to the specific host country context in my empirical research. I will compare countries where students are fairly within the comfort zone in terms of language, host country Westernization, and physical similarity to residents of those countries that have none of these aspects in common with the US. Secondly, the topics of experiential learning and service learning as related to intercultural contact are not touched upon. Study abroad providers must primarily focus on academics, but even Hoff (2008) found that the literature about the academic benefits of studying abroad is limited. It is further limited in terms of the value of service learning and experiential learning, two aspects of a program that, in my experience, attract a large student contingent. I am left asking questions about how intercultural contact framed by “service” instead of “being served” affects personal growth and transformation. Though I do not directly incorporate this in my study, this growing sector of international education should be one of the foremost priorities in research. Thirdly, the scope of the research is limited by a narrow sample. I saw only one instance of an author investigating the study abroad experience through the experience of another contingency in the study abroad ecosystem; host families, professors, local people, service providers, and program administrators are largely silent, with the foreign students always remaining the sample. Kathryn Mathers, a scholar who studies the relationship of young Americans to Africa, comments on the American protagonist as part of a broader national narrative: “This story—been there, saw it, suffered through it—gives the traveler the required authority to know how to solve the problems they saw. It highlights how these stories teach readers to care about American travelers and not the Africans that they encounter” (2012). To Mathers, promoting the centrality of the American students abroad by making them the only sample of research plays into “hiding [local] people in plain sight as part of landscape… an effective silencing tool.” Research that seeks the input of diverse stakeholders is a key step to equity in study abroad. An important part of personal growth is the recognition of mutual transformation. Students need to recognize how they themselves affect those around them in the study abroad context, both positively and negatively, as does the academy.

ConclusionIn the literature, several arguments were salient across researchers. Firstly, individual and structural variables combine to influence intercultural contact. An overhaul of the study abroad industry will not solve personal issues abroad, just as a major shift in personal responsibility may

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not translate to the entire industry. However, scholars do make a few suggestions, some of which go against the market logic of international education. First, scaling up does not indicate success. Instead of focusing on involving more students in study abroad, industry providers should be investing in involving the right students. The field should directly promote the inclusion of diversity in the peer cohort and have an intention to require more of students than product consumption. Similarly, scholars note that a larger supply of study abroad programs is not necessarily a positive indicator. It is more important that good programs are being promoted and developed rather than superfluous, overlapping new programs are created. International education ought not to fall into the “manifest destiny” mentality of expansionism.

Several suggestions emerge across the literature reviewed that relate to host-culture contact. The first is the need for increased intercultural contact. Quality intercultural contact can be promoted by encouraging language study, community service, living in host families, and participatory modes of research. This is supported by the framework shift presented by Robert Selby regarding the difference between international and intercultural education: “In oversimplified terms, international education leads students to learn about the objective, material culture of others – their political and social institutions, their language, art, and literature – while intercultural education leads students to learn about the subjective meaning people ascribe to events and relationships with institutions and other people, and ultimately to themselves” (2008, p. 4). Additionally, increased contact will lead to a shift from sympathy to empathy, which many researchers indicate as a priority. Students should learn not to just tolerate those in the perceived “outgroup,” but to accept difference, understand others’ viewpoints, and act as an ally. Students should value others not “in spite of” their differences but “because of” them. Experiences students have of relative deprivation and privilege can be harnessed for dialogue within the peer cohort, transforming the in-group from a crutch to a jumping-off-point for more intercultural interaction. Additionally, the field of international education should encourage student learning from ordinary aspects of the host culture, rather than focusing learning from manufactured and extraordinary experiences. The creation of inauthentic and sensationalist experiences for sojourners is fuelled by the consumerist approach to international education and does little more than promote single-minded viewpoints. Valuing local nuances of global trends and enjoying the “authentic” aspects of the host culture will support already-existing local economies and provide a sound entry point for intercultural interaction. Instead of being a driving force in the commodification of authenticity, the study abroad program should become an organic part of the local system through mutually beneficial relationships. This same shift of focus from the extraordinary to the ordinary is reflected in broader social movements as well. Arundhati Roy, an Indian journalist and activist, once appealed to the global community to accept the challenge of “losing our terror of the mundane” in association with crisis reportage: “We have to use our skills and imagination and our art to re-create the rhythms of the endless crisis of normality, and in doing so, expose the policies and processes that make ordinary things —food, water, shelter, and dignity— such a distant dream for ordinary people” (2002). If study abroad really can be a “search for solutions” (Reilly & Senders, 2009) it must halt the bumbling search for imagined authenticities and instead pause to contemplate the “mundane.” Friendship is the definition of this: others are neither limited by transactional nor instrumental relationships, but instead companions for everyday life.

Having reviewed the existing literature about the contemporary context of study abroad, the multiple levels of interaction for students abroad, and the individual and institutional

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influences on cross-cultural contact, I will now describe the theory within which the academic narrative can be understood. Themes of privilege, authenticity, and the “third culture” will be explored in the following section which introduces Contact Theory, the I-Thou relationship, and Rawlsian Justice.

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III.Theory Intercultural contact in study abroad is part of a larger global project for increased empathy and understanding of interconnectedness. Wisdoms from fields outside of international education can provide broader frameworks for analysis, which in turn can make lessons learned from this paper applicable beyond the reach of study abroad. To employ interdisciplinary, I will use psychology, theology, and political science to frame the subject of intercultural contact in study abroad. This chapter introduces several theories, some serving as analytical frameworks and others as a basic lexicon for original analysis. This paper requires a double definition of terms. First, to understand intercultural contact, I will introduce Contact Theory (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew, 1998; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011), which posits that intergroup contact will reduce cross-group prejudice, given facilitating circumstances. To understand the elusive concept of transformation, I will introduce the writings of Martin Buber, focusing on his book I and Thou, originally published in 1937. I will demonstrate contemporary application of his theory through nonviolent action (Gandhi, 1938; Cortright, 2010) and justice theory (Rawls, 1971; Sandal, 2009). The three functional social networks described by Bochner et al. can be understood both in terms of contact theory and Buber’s theology, and I will develop these connections into my analysis. After reviewing my theoretical foundations, I will ground my research by introducing analyses specific to study abroad and intercultural contact. These include the personas of the student-consumer, the student-tourist, and the colonial student, which will provide a theoretical foundation for my friendship pattern analysis in the Discussion chapter.

ContactTheoryContact theory was pioneered by G.W. Allport in his book The Nature of Prejudice (1954). Although his hypothesis was short and unsupported, his idea that intergroup contact could reduce prejudice contingent on certain conditions has developed into a complex theory of social psychology.18 Contact theory has implications for the field of intergroup relations and has been previously analyzed in the context of international education. First, I will go over its original tenets and then examine recent research by current experts such as T.F. Pettigrew, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Even though most studies report positive contact effects19 regardless of facilitating or essential circumstances (Pettigrew, 1998), each theorist outlines his or her own conditions as independent variables in the experimental study. To begin with, Allport’s optimal conditions are:

1. equal group status within the situation 2. common goals 3. intergroup cooperation instead of competition 4. the support of authorities, laws, or customs.

Each of these conditions is described below with an example regarding a host family, inspired by personal experience:

18 The 2011 meta-analysis of Pettigrew and Tropp included 515 items in the comprehensive bibliography. 19 Decrease in prejudice along with, “reduced anxiety, individual threat, collective threat, and ingroup identification together with enhanced empathy, perspective taking, outgroup knowledge, intergroup trust, forgiveness, job attainment and satisfaction, and perceptions of outgroup variability” (Pettigrew, 2011, p. 275)

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Allport’s conditions for optimal contact (1954)

Example (taken from personal experience with host families)

1. Equal group status within the situation

A host mother treats her own child and the foreign student with equal affection and discipline

2. Common goals A common effort on both the family’s and student’s behalf to build a meaningful relationship: for the host family, hosting a student is more than revenue generation; for the student, the host family is more than a means to so-called “cultural immersion.”

3. Intergroup cooperation rather than competition

Host family members and the foreign student are peer teachers in cultural sharing, rather than simply performing a cross-cultural “show and tell” in which cultures are compared and valued against one another ethnocentrically.

4. The support of authorities, laws, or customs

The program staff advocates on the side of either the host family or the student to make sure that all of the contractual commitments are being met, such as proper facilities, privacy, and interaction.

Table 3: Qualitative examples of Allport's four essential conditions for positive cross-group contact

Although Allport’s key conditions are able to be met in a hypothetical situation such as this, they are more challenging to meet in the larger context of a student abroad in a foreign culture, especially in an intercultural context where different groups understand each condition differently. Cross-cultural conflict could emerge when one party sees an interaction as equalizing while another sees it as creating further inequalities. Scholars have concluded that while these four conditions are important and facilitate positive contact effects, they are not necessarily “essential” (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011, p. 76). Pettigrew (1998) identifies four problems with contact theory: causal sequence, independent variable specification, unspecified processes of change, and generalization of effects. Causal sequence refers to selection bias in intergroup contact: the fact that individuals from two groups are interacting in spite of the preexisting societal norms by default identifies them as atypical group members. The “typical” ingroup member, or in this case the 99% of students enrolled full-time or part time in higher education, will rarely come into contact with the outgroup. Studies have shown that students who go abroad display more cultural curiosity and intercultural competence potential than other students (Savicki, Binder, & Heller, 2008). Selection bias relates to the fourth problem Pettigrew identifies, the generalization of effects. If students are atypical members of their ingroup, how predictive can research that samples them be? A survey of students abroad may not generalize to the population of American college students or to the wider population. Also, studies may not generalize across cultures. The second problem Pettigrew indicates, unspecified independent variables, refers to the tendency of experts writing on intergroup contact theory to identify a “laundry list” of conditions for positive contact effects. Conditions should be split between facilitating and essential conditions, which leads to the third problem, the unspecified processes of change, which Pettigrew elaborates on generously. Pettigrew offers the following critique of Allport’s original hypothesis: “The original hypothesis says nothing about the processes by which contact changes attitudes and behavior. It

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predicts only when contact will lead to positive change, not how and why the change occurs.” He suggests that recent studies have shown the emergence of “four interrelated processes that operate through contact and mediate attitude change,” each of which I relate to a cognitive, affective, or behavioral dimension. The processes are listed and explained in the table below. Pettigrew’s Processes (1995)

A-B-C Designation (Ward et al. 2001)

Transformation in Study Abroad

1. Learning about the outgroup

Cognitive Learning about positioning relative to the host culture

2. Changing behavior Behavioral Increased self-awareness, attention to cultural norms 3. Generalization of outgroup learning

Cognitive, Affective Taking a personal experience and expanding it beyond the self, recognition of systemic relationships beyond the personal and interpersonal, development of empathy

4. Ingroup reappraisal Cognitive, Affective Increased understanding of positioning related to the world or conationals

Table 4: Processes from Pettigrew (1998) and their applications in study abroad

Since study abroad is a process-based experience, and it is impossible to create a controlled environment in which Allport’s previously-mentioned four key conditions are present, the processes that Pettigrew offers expand the application of contact theory to international education. First, learning about the outgroup can be performed in the classroom, the homestay, experiential learning environments, or through local interactions, and is arguably the largest focus of study abroad in general. However, studies have shown that “learning about the outgroup” only reduces prejudice if “(a) the outgroup’s behavior is starkly inconsistent with their stereotype and strongly associated with their label, (b) occurs often and in many situations, and (c) the outgroup members are seen as typical” (Rothbart & John, 1985 qtd. in Pettigrew, 1998). For example, if American students in India are learning about gender roles in the home through home stay observation, and see their respective host families as a typical representation of Indian culture, occurrences such as gender segregation, behavioral change upon gender integration, and strong disparities in household power distribution will inform the student about the “outgroup.” However, instead of debunking previous stereotypes, more may emerge from this sort of exposure. Considering that an intercultural encounter that satisfies all three of Rothbart and John’s conditions is rare and the fact that cognitive processes alone do not lead to a reduction in prejudice, even though learning about the outgroup is an objective of study abroad, it may not be the most transformative element. The next process Pettigrew (1998) notes is changing behavior. Intergroup contact by nature will result in behavioral change, however slight, which is a precursor of attitudinal change when larger social expectations include acceptance of outgroup members (p. 71). For example, students abroad adapt their behavior in a host family situation by nature of the intercultural context: they may demonstrate increased sympathy, flexibility in terms of notions of “privacy,” and patience in building relationships with their host family. A host family will also shift behavior due to having a foreign student living with them. This mutual adjustment that happens as a process —both repeatedly and over time— will lead to positive contact effects on both sides. However, one may question the permanence of this behavioral change. Upon repatriation, do the new behaviors remain active, go into dormancy until future cross-cultural encounters, or go extinct altogether?

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Generalizing of outgroup learning is strongly related to generating affective ties. As previously noted in this study, friendship plays a special role in cross-group prejudice reduction. If someone becomes a friend of a member of one outgroup, oftentimes the prejudice reduction will extend to members of all outgroups or related outgroups. For example, students abroad who build close relationships with their host family, teachers, or friends in one area of India could have decreased prejudice to all Indians, all South Asians, or even all members of the developing world. Likewise, a foreign student who is seen in a host family as “one of the family” could reduce family members’ prejudice to all Westerners, not just ones that share the student’s nationality. The powerful force of friendship in intergroup prejudice reduction is partly what inspired my research in friendship patterns among foreigners, to see if students abroad really do form friendships with local people or if locals compose a utilitarian, rather than intimate, social network. The last process Pettigrew identifies is ingroup reappraisal, directly connecting to the goal in international education that participants learn not only about the outgroup but also about their own ingroup through intergroup contact. This expansion of worldview, or self-awareness as a result of understanding another’s worldview, is the central outcome of the “transformation” that international educators promote. This idea is central to the concepts of positionality and self-reflexivity. Thus, as students learn more about the outgroup, they in turn learn about how their own “voice” is situated within the “vectors of time, space, and social power” (Credo Reference). Outcomes of the meta-analysis Thomas Pettigrew revisits contact theory in his 2011 meta-analysis of relevant studies. His meta-analysis found that Allport’s “key conditions” for intergroup contact facilitated but were not essential to prejudice reduction (275). He also found that many dependent variables besides decreased prejudice emerge, including but not limited to reduced anxiety related to intergroup interactions, and reduced perceptions of individual and collective threat. Additionally, there is increased trust, forgiveness, trust, and empathy. Contact effects typically do generalize to the entire groups involved (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006; ibid. 2011). Lastly, Pettigrew notes a more differentiated view of the outgroup by the ingroup (demonstrated by Janes (2008) as an inability to “sum up” the host culture in one sentence after a semester of interaction) which is associated with an even greater deprovincialization, again extending beyond the borders of the two groups involved in contact: “This new view of your ingroup may open you up to accepting other outgroups - even those with whom you have never had contact” (p. 276). Opening a new vein of discourse, Pettigrew asks about negative effects of contact. Given “involuntary contact” is most likely to have potential negative contact effects, international education is not at a high risk. Students who self-select to go abroad are less likely to consider host culture contact as “involuntary” and therefore less likely to suffer negative contact effects than the average sojourner. Though it is out of their control, self-selecting to go abroad in a specific program aligned with the student’s goals counteracts this. Even so, in terms of greater social transformation, several mixed consequences to intergroup contact have been documented. The first is that the positive effects of contact are experienced unequally: individuals in the “majority culture” have a stronger positive response to intergroup contact, while those in the “minority culture” enjoy fewer benefits (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011). This could mean that the hosting culture could experience a larger impact of intergroup contact than do the foreign sojourners (even more of a reason to study the externalities of study abroad on the local community). Secondly, minority group members who have experienced intergroup contact are

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less likely to take a stance for social action; though relative deprivation becomes increasingly evident, the minority group may become increasingly complacent (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2001). In his study, Bochner et al. measures international students’ affective ties. By comparing association rate and friendship rates, Bochner et al. measures the amount of intergroup contact and the resulting affective ties. They ultimately find that monocultural relationships are of vital importance to students, relationships with the host culture should grow beyond being a “means to an end,” and multicultural relationships should likewise be expanded beyond superficial learning (1977, p. 292). Testing independent variables to see which have the strongest relationship with association and friendship patterns would provide a check on Allport’s four facilitating conditions – is a reason for the functional nature of host relationships an absence of one or more of the four facilitating circumstances? In the present study, I use the conceptual variables of host country accessibility, the level of program-sponsored community integration, and individual influences to test several hypotheses which I will introduce in the following chapter. Additionally, incorporating Pettigrew’s processes in a time-delay survey would allow for evaluation – which processes most affect the student during their limited time abroad? In the present study, when I replicate the original Bochner et al. survey, I will test country, program, and individual-level variables that may have a relationship to friendship patterns, association patterns, and companion nationality preferences for several activities, though determining correlation versus causation will be a challenge. In the following section, we will move onto another framework for meaningful interaction, theologian Martin Buber’s I and Thou.

I‐ThouMartin Buber describes the world as “twofold, in accordance with man’s twofold attitude.” Applied to international education, Buber’s description of man’s two different essential attitudes provides a useful framework for understanding transformation. The two attitudes are “I-It” and “I-You.” Buber uses these word pairs, which he calls “basic words,” to describe two distinct methods through which “one” and “the other” can interact. From calling another “It,” the “It-world” is born; from calling another “You,” the “You-world” is born. The It-world is where one “experiences” the other. The man who sees the world as “I-It” experiences the world but the world does not experience him, “For the experience is ‘in them’ and not between them and the world” (p. 56). He uses “goal-directed verbs” (p. 54) such as perceive, feel, imagine, want, and think, while seeing the other as only a means to his end. The other is a thing among things, trapped in a “spatio-temporal-causal context” (p. 81). The It is seen as measured and bordered, a fragmented “aggregate of qualities” (p. 69). And, just as the It is seen as unwhole, “I-It” can never be said with the whole being; neither the I nor the It can ever find authentic encounter or mutual liberation in the It-world. The You-world is not experience, it is relation. The other is both a means and an end. The word “I-You” is spoken with the whole being, and it is reciprocated. The other is not a thing among things, and is not found in any Sometime or any Somewhere (p. 59): “Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation” (p. 55). Buber summarizes:

The relation to the You is unmediated. Nothing conceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; and memory itself is changed is it plunges from particularity into wholeness. No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur (pp. 62-63).

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“Actual life is encounter” (p. 62), and together, encounters are “a sign of the world order” (p. 83). While the It-world is comfortable, and full of “stimulations and excitements, activities and knowledge” (p. 85), actual encounters can never occur. It is the You-world, perceived as lonely, volatile, and unreliable, where reciprocity can occur. And through reciprocity, encounter:

[In the You-world] there is a reciprocity of giving: you say You to it and you give yourself to it; it says You to you and gives itself to you. You cannot come to an understanding about it with others; you are lonely with it; but it teaches you to encounter others and to stand your ground in such encounters; and through the grace of its advents and the melancholy of its departures it leads you to that You in which the lines of relation, though parallel, intersect. It does not help you to survive; it only helps you to have intimations of eternity (p. 84).

The relationship between the It-world and the You-world is one of eternal creation and re-creation. By appropriating the You-world, it becomes an It-world: “As soon as the relationship has run its course or is permeated by means, the You becomes an object among objects, possibly the noblest one and yet one of them, assigned its measure and boundary” (p. 68). This constant process characterizes the cycles of life and time. International education is an individual exploration of the world, and intercultural contact in study abroad relies on encounter. When we use the word ‘exchange,’ we mean reciprocity; when we use the word ‘transformation,’ we mean the transcendence of experience and the embracing of relation. The encounter is both the means and the end in international education. In order for international education to cultivate and foster a space where its goals can be met, it must perform according to the values of the You-world, which are wholeness, reciprocity, and process. These same values are foundational in nonviolence theory, which I will describe to give an application of Buber’s theory in practice. Nonviolence theory has historically been applied in contexts of intercultural contact, which relates to my focused inquiry on intercultural contact in international education. Nonviolence

Nonviolence is the method of testing truth and transforming conflict through the power of love. According to Buber, “Love is responsibility of an I for a You” (p. 66); therefore, nonviolence can only be a tool of the You-world, and never of the It-world. Nonviolence relies on active engagement (satyagraha), not detached pacifism. It relies on reciprocal relation, not on particulate experience. Nonviolence has roots in many religious traditions, including the Buddhist concept of nonattachment and the Christian concept of agape. The modern approach to nonviolence was led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi during the “Quit India” movement in 1947. Later, civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. followed his precedent internationally.

Martin Buber’s “I-You” relationship is based on an encounter of reciprocal wholeness, which also predicates nonviolent action. The satyagrahi, or one who does nonviolence, enters into an I-You relationship with the adversary, thus testing Buber’s assertion that by using the sacred basic word of “You” with the adversary, “The ‘wicked’ become a revelation” (66). While some would even refuse to engage the adversary on the “I-It” level, Gandhi calls upon nonviolent resisters to find strength and self-reliance by choosing to address the adversary as

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whole and valuable “You”: “Experience has taught me that civility is the most difficult part of satyagraha. Civility does not here mean the mere outward gentleness of speech cultivated for the occasion but an inborn gentleness and desire to do the opponent good” (Gandhi, 1957, p. 364). Gandhi does not believe that the adversary is unwhole, and approaches him with genuine concern: the first step in the practice of satyagraha, and a central tenet of the You-world.

According to the principles of nonviolence, social and individual transformation cannot occur through coercion; they must occur through conversion, in which the goal is not to defeat the adversary but instead for the adversary to willingly come to the side of righteousness. The adversary is not seen as a problematic, alienated “other,” but instead a part of a holistic solution. Because of this, it is not only overcoming all forms of violence towards an adversary but also reaching out to them with love that is the boldest aspect of satyagraha.

In application, the I-You relationship, invoking mutual wholeness, means that the “You” adversary is linked in a state of mutual oppression with the “I.” Thus, the liberation must also be mutual. Nonviolence practitioners advocate for the same justice whether an individual is the ultimate victim or the ultimate oppressor, seeing as the liberation of both is intricately intertwined. In King’s context, this led to his conclusion that “real nonviolence requires an understanding that white oppressors and black victims are mutually entrapped in a set of relationships that violate the submerged best interests of everyone” (Cortright, 2010, p. 62). As he wrote in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail (1963): “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” (as cited in Howard-Pitney, p.73) Gandhi believed that the interests of every last person, from the ultimate victim to the ultimate oppressor, must be accounted for in a cost-benefit analysis of action: “To slight a single human being is to slight these divine powers, and thus to harm not only that being, but with him the whole world” (1957, pp. 230-231). This belief forms the uncompromising Gandhian attitude regarding ends and means.

For both Gandhi and Buber, foundational emphasis is placed on this mutual inclusivity of ends and means: according to nonviolence expert David Cortright, “Ends and means are not distinct categories of analysis but complementary components of the same reality” (2010, p. 17). However, Buber’s concern is a sole focus on means while Gandhi’s concern is a sole focus on ends. Buber contends, echoing the Kantian ethic, that immoral means can never lead to moral ends; Gandhi argues that only moral means will ultimately lead to moral ends. Their opinions form two sides of the same coin. This discussion is parallel to the discussion of process-focused and outcomes-focused transformation in study abroad. More specifically, should international education focus on “outcomes” such as language acquisition, academic performance, cross-cultural competence, or “processes” such as cross-cultural exchange, relationship building, and participatory research? It also mirrors the developments in Contact Theory: is it fixed conditions that influence contact (Allport, 1954) or instead a set of interrelated processes (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011)? Later in this chapter I will return to this question with source material from contact theory.

While ends and means are decidedly unified, the individual and the system are seen as two separate entities. In Buber’s “It-world,” the other is the same as the system from which it is formed. The It is no more than an “aggregate of qualities,” defined through characteristics which are perceived as representative, but in actuality may not be. Conversely, the You is wholly independent of the larger system; the You is unordered, knowing “no system of coordinates” (p. 81). Gandhi demonstrates this differentiation by contending that it is not the oppressors

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themselves who should be blamed for injustice, but instead the system from within they operate. Referring to the British colonialists, he states, “I have no quarrel with the rulers. I have every quarrel with their methods” (1938, p. 118). In this statement alone, Gandhi brings out two salient ideas: first, that means and ends must be analyzed together; second, that an individual must be analyzed as independent of the dominant system.

The You-world is not an Eden of security and grace. Neither is the process of building it. Encounters come through sacred confrontation,20 which in the context of Indian independence, Gandhi enacted through noncooperation: “If we are to receive self-governance we will have to take it. We will never be granted self-governance” (Fischer, pp. 136-137). Later, in the Black Power movement, theologian James Cone wrote, “To love the white man means that the black man confronts him as a Thou without any intentions of giving ground by becoming an It. Though the white man is accustomed to addressing an It, in the new black man he meets a Thou” (Cone 1969, p. 53). A defiance of authority combined with a concern for the adversary as the You throws off balance the individuals working within an oppressive system and allows an opportunity for transformation. From this confrontation, conflict arises. However, as King contends, this conflict is not new: it is the conflict based in injustice that has been hidden beneath the surface (King, 1963). Without this confrontation and conflict, the You-world cannot be created and authentic encounter cannot occur. Similarly, intercultural contact is not meant to be smooth: dismantling barriers and preconceptions may not be a comfortable process for either party involved. In a situation of privilege, it is easy to forget that relationships must be based on reciprocal wholeness: “My You acts on me as I act on it. Our students teach us, our works form us” (Buber, 66). In international education, how can intercultural contact retain wholeness, reciprocity, and unified means and ends? How can international education move closer towards an I-You relation and further from an I-It experience? We focus so intently on what students can gain from their host cultures, while missing what they can offer (and I do not suggest painting elementary schools or teaching English as a second language). Gandhi’s message that one should live a life of total engagement will call institutions to highly integrate students into the culture regardless of comfort zones, and also to be just as responsive to local impacts as they are to student impacts. Students can return from abroad with knowledge of self, society, and the soil they traversed (Kumar, 2010). Students will become empowered not only to do what they can do considering their own abilities, competencies, and limitations, but also what they should do. One way of understanding how international education “should” be is through Rawlsian justice, which will be introduced in the following section, after a brief analysis that combines Allport’s conditions, Pettigrew’s processes, and Buber’s values.

ABCmodelofacculturationThe ABC model of acculturation (Ward et al., 2001) includes affective, behavioral, and cognitive aspects of individual transformation. Previously, I have used the ABC model as a way of organizing study abroad processes and outcomes, citing examples from the University of Minnesota Educational Philosophy for their international development program, and Reilly and Senders’ nine trends of Critical Study Abroad. Allport’s conditions, Pettigrew’s processes, and Buber’s values can be organized by the same model, as seen in the figure below. 20 Buber describes “liberation” as the emergence into “a unique confrontation” (p. 88).

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Figure 5: Allport (1954), Pettigrew (1995), and Buber (1937) within the ABC model of Acculturation (Ward et al., 2001)

It is clear that Buber’s values are distributed among the three ABC categories, while Pettigrew is in the cognitive realm and Allport is in the affective realm. Transformation, the ultimate process/outcome of the present study, is found at the nexus of the ABC model. Friendship patterns, the engine of the empirical analysis, are a behavioral outcome of affective ties and cognitive processes. The three points on the right side of the figure, connected to the central “Transformation” label, represent the three aspects of transformation introduced in the beginning of this study. These tenets were developed with a similar methodology to the development of the above figure by combining Allport, Pettigrew, and Buber.

JohnRawlsandjusticeWe have already asked the questions “How can intercultural contact be transformative?” Contact theory gives several facilitating conditions for setting up intercultural contact and Buber’s book I-Thou outlines several vital, yet demanding, methods. Yet, one question remains. Moving into the sphere of ethics, we ask “How should study abroad be transformative?” In the context of Contact Theory and an I-Thou framework, the concept of justice plays the important role of acknowledging social responsibility to others. It is a way of taking individual interests and terms

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and replicating them on institutional and broader social levels. The concept of justice relates to Buber’s interest in wholeness, reciprocity, and ends and means by operationalizing these values. To emphasize the interdisciplinary of this inquiry, I will include the political science perspective to match the psychological, sociological and theological viewpoints present.

Essayist Michael J. Sandal, in his book Justice, translates the founding inquiries of justice theory into simple language:

To ask whether a society is just is to ask how it distributes the things we prize – income and wealth, duties and rights, powers and opportunities. A just society distributes these goods in the right way; it gives each person his or her due. The hard questions begin when we ask what people are due and why (p. 19).

In the field of study abroad, given its relative inaccessibility, the international breadth of “supply chain” networks, and the goal of transformation, one must ask the questions, “Is study abroad just? What is due to whom?” Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971) is one way to examine this question. John Rawls, a 20th century political theorist, created the “difference principle” as a way to understand inequality and social change. He argues that “only those social and economic inequalities are permitted that work to the benefit of the least advantaged members of society” (Sandal, 2009, p. 151). To rephrase, decisions should be made based on a “social bottom line,” defined by the outcome’s benefit to the most disenfranchised members of society. Relating this to building relationships across cultures, the difference principle gives a strong prescription for how individuals with privilege should understand their responsibility to the wider society.

Rawls developed this standard through a philosophical exercise. Starting from an imaginary situation of initial equality, in which we assume that all members of society are under a veil of ignorance of the community-wide distribution of talents, assets, and gifts, he asks what would result from a hypothetical negotiation of a social contract. According to Rawls, two foundational principles would emerge: first, all individuals would be granted equal basic liberties; second, only those social and economic inequalities would be permitted which work to the advantage of the least-off members of society. This does not mean that those with “talent” or “gifts” remain inactualized in their use; the gifted are encouraged to develop and exercise their talents, but “with the understanding that the rewards these talents reap in the market belong to the community as a whole” (Rawls, 1971, sec. 17). The academy’s answer to this question is Reilly and Senders’ Critical Study Abroad, which requires study abroad to respond to issues of global crisis.

The two main objections to Rawls’ theory are that the difference principle lacks incentives and does not recognize the moral entitlement to the rewards of our efforts (Sandal, 2009, p. 157-158). Sandal dismisses the first criticism by indicating Rawls’ use of income inequality as the chief incentive. Additionally, Sandal argues that we are morally entitled to the rewards of our efforts in a game of skill, but not in a game of chance. On one hand, whether an individual’s skills yield profit depends on the societal demand for them. However, an elevated line of questioning asks whether worldly success truly reflects what we “deserve.” Sandal’s chapter closes with a moving argument: “Natural distribution is neither just nor unjust. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts” (165). By undergoing transformative cross cultural experiences, such as intercultural friendships, students become better equipped to do this as a result of their increased understanding of the interrelatedness between self and other, in addition to learning about each independently.

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To my mind, international education can only enter into the You-world when it is built on principles of justice. Structures that promote inequality, profiteering, and cultural imperialism will root study abroad firmly in the It-world. Rawls’ Theory of Justice resonates with both Contact Theory and the I-Thou ideal. In Contact Theory, Allport regards “equal status within the situation” as an essential condition, and Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” does not fall far from this theoretical tree. Rawls’ second condition, “only those inequalities are permitted which work toward the advantage of the least-off members of society,” reflects a situation that is based upon common goals and cooperation. The notion of a social contract altogether reflects “explicit social sanction.” Rawls and Allport desire the same starting-point from which prime intergroup and interpersonal relations can be had: those which rely on Buber’s emphasized wholeness, reciprocity, and unified means and ends. Rawls’ Theory of Justice is manifested in Buber’s ideal You-world: “To encounter another authentically… is to forego all designs and instrumental purposes. It is to give of self in order to understand and appreciate the other. This stance… makes the well-being of another person the ultimate end of the human endeavor” (Cortright, 2010, p. 56). Applying a demanding theory such as this on a worldly concept such as study abroad will provide a challenge, and in the following section I will attempt to meet it.

TheoryinthecontextofstudyabroadWhile reviewing the supporting theory, I have defined the two main aspects of research question “How can intercultural contact be transformative in the context of study abroad?” From Allport’s contact theory and Pettigrew’s critique and analysis, “intercultural contact” has demonstrated the potential to improve intergroup relations, even beyond prejudice reduction. Meanwhile, the ideals revealed in Martin Buber’s book I and Thou can easily provide a foundation for the ideal intercultural relationship. With the terms defined, the final question remains: Can intercultural contact lead to transformation in the context of study abroad? If so, how?

Though giving and taking are the primary interaction of cross-cultural contact, rarely is it “exchange” – let alone authentic encounter. In many ways, study abroad is motivated by “experience,” defined by Buber as “knowledge of something’s condition.” In fact, the way that we talk about study abroad usually confines it within the borders of the It-world. We see border-crossing as an entitlement, cultures as deep pools within which we can immerse ourselves, and frequently use “goal-directed verbs” to understand intercultural contact: I reflect, I perceive, I learn, I experience. The experience quickly becomes appropriated: “My host family,” “My village,” “My time in South Africa.” Buber’s description of a man saying “I-It” could easily describe a student abroad:

He bends down to examine particulars under the objectifying magnifying glass of close scrutiny, or he uses the objectifying telescope of distant vision to arrange them as mere scenery. In his contemplation he isolates them without any feeling for the exclusive or joins them without any world feeling (pp. 80-81).

To a student abroad in the It-world, people inhabiting the contact zone become no more than an extension of “place,” a part of the local landscape, while the student’s own personal goals are central, violating several of Allport’s stipulations. Thus, of the I-It pair, the “I” becomes more salient, manifested in the persona of the “colonial student” (Ogden, 2002), the gaze of the tourist (Urry, 1990), and the market where the students are simply product consumers (Bolen, 2001), three ideas which I will now introduce. These three theoretical models – consumerism, tourism

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sociology, and colonialism – provide evidence of the It-world mentality of study abroad participants and providers alike.

ConsumerismConsumerism is more than the buying of physical objects: it extends to the buying of experiences, which is where international education finds a market. Students act as consumers and educators as consumer service providers (Engle & Engle, 2002). Students consume the product of study abroad, which fills leisure time and “avoids the sin of idling away for a semester” (Bolen, 2001). Through consumption, consumers create a personal identity and value system (Bocock, 1993): “Students already expect that consuming this culture will assist them in making decisions about who they are as Americans, workers, and human beings” (Bolen, 2001, p. 186). In a world where study abroad is approached from a consumerist mindset, students demand luxury services, programs have academic protocols with no class on Fridays, and study abroad is seen as a stepping stone to future career-focused success. It is a means to an end: “Like higher education, study abroad now fits into the consumer ethos as a means of earning more money and enjoying the American standard of living” (Bolen, 2001, p. 187). What is the product that students look to consume? According to international educators John and Lilli Engle, the field of study abroad provides “a picture our students want to see, one drawn by skilled consumers with an American confidence that world which increasingly seems to resemble ours really is like ours, and soon will be” (Engle & Engle, 2002, p. 36). Instead of seeking authentic intercultural contact and an expansion of comfort zones, programs specifically designed for American students “typically ensure that students are taught in the same way as they have been at home and that they live with, as well as learn with, other American students and not with those from [the host culture]” (Janes, 2008, p. 23). Following trends of hip consumerism, referring to “expressing oneself by buying products to show one’s difference from the conventional crowd” (Frank, 1997), students seek increasingly exotic and extreme programs, which create markets for more “culturally challenging” environments. Engle and Engle elaborate on this process: “The search for more exotic cultural challenge has created a new set of health and safety concerns which, raised with increasing insistence in recent years, may paradoxically lead to a reinforcement of the American cocoon throughout the world” (2002, p. 27). On top of that, already existing programs become buried beneath slews of new programs. Bolen proposes “international educators … need to question closely why they or their institutions want to create programs if good alternatives already exist” (Bolen, 2001 p. 191). Because this consumerist mentality overcomes all other forces in study abroad, an “inherent irony” emerges, according to one scholar-practitioner: “We build education abroad programs based primarily on U.S. student demand and then secondarily concern ourselves with issues of intercultural integration” (Ogden, 2002). According to Schumacher (1973), the ownership and consumption of goods and services is no more than a means to an end, which permanently alienates it from Buber’s You-world. Putting a price on something symbolizes its ability to be replaced and no longer makes it sacred – making I-You encounters decidedly problematic as they are based on sacred confrontation. In addition, consumption is a barrier to justice: “The danger is that consumption masks economic and political inequalities and numbs people into believing that they are autonomous ‘choosers’ in a culturally neutral marketplace” (Smith, 1999, p. 103). Consumerism is does not equip individuals to be givers, but rather takers. When students only learn how to consume material goods and experiences from the host culture, they never learn how to give anything but the same. Ultimately, as Schumacher concludes, “Development does not start with goods: it starts with

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people and their education, organization, and discipline” (p. 178). In order to have a non-materialist economy, there must be opportunity to fulfill three needs: “to give a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centeredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence” (Schumacher, 1973, p. 58). Materialism and consumerism force people to focus on means and not ends, and makes one think of development in terms of creation and not evolution (p. 176). This “creative” lens, which is based on perception and a dominant cultural narrative, is the focus of the following analysis of the tourist gaze.

TheTouristGazeThe “Tourist Gaze,” based on the Foucaultian medical gaze, was first put forth by John Urry (1990) as an argument that the tourist experience is fundamentally visual in nature. At its most negative, the tourist gaze is described as a “hedonistic cultural lens which defines the locality in relation to the degree with which it fulfills [tourists’] leisure needs and matches their expectations” (Janes, 2008, p. 23). Though visualization is accompanied by other senses, Urry argues that the “gaze” of the tourist upon the destination landscape and townscape “endows the tourist experience with a striking, almost sacred, importance” (1992). The concept of the tourist gaze brings intercultural contact as a central aspect of the academic sojourn: tourist gazes primarily act to “organize the encounters of visitors with the ‘other’” (Urry, 1990, p. 145).

For the ego-centric tourist, the tourist gaze is embodied by a contrived treasure hunt for cultural authenticity where tourists find themselves “rushing from symbolic attraction to symbolic attraction in a vain search for human understanding, self revelation, and a sense of unity” (MacCannell, 1999). Linda Tuhiwai Smith, in her book Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), describes the implicit meaning of researchers seeking authenticity, which is also applicable to tourists:

What counts as ‘authentic’ is one of the criteria used by the West to determine who really is indigenous, who is worth saving, who is still innocent and free from Western contamination… At the heart of such a view of authenticity is a belief that indigenous cultures cannot change, cannot recreate themselves and still claim to be indigenous. Nor can they be complicated, internally diverse or contradictory. Only the West has that privilege (p. 74).

Individuals are less motivated by the specific objects of their observation than they are by the objects’ meanings and the way they fit into already-imagined concepts of place. On some level, people do not seek product-based satisfaction, but instead satisfaction stemming from the anticipation of experiencing “in reality” the “pleasurable dramas they have already experienced in their imagination” (Campbell, 1987). Tourists are motivated by the pursuit of perceived “authenticity” through accessing “back regions” in addition to “front regions” (MacCannell, 1973), an endeavor which has three characteristics: (1) organized by professionals, (2) authorized by discourse (such as labels of educational, restorative and recreational travel), and (3) enacted both through solitary romanticism and shared collectivism (Urry, 1992).

These three characteristics can be directly applied to study abroad, though a large contingent of educational sojourners adamantly differentiate themselves from tourists. One of the main methods students employ to differentiate themselves from tourists is by citing meaningful intercultural contact (Prins & Webster, 2010). According to a study by two scholar-practitioners about a team of American students participating in international service learning in Belize,

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“Seemingly nominal expressions of civility—exchanging greetings, making introductions and small talk—led students to conclude that locals considered them friends, which meant they were not tourists” (Prins & Webster, 2010). In the literature about study abroad, there is a concerted effort to “overcome” this “It-world” tourist gaze (Janes, 2001; Wilkes, 2008; Prins and Webster, 2010). Wilkes (2008) discusses the “student gaze,” and calls upon study abroad providers to take up the mission of well-intentionally “constructing” it, demonstrating an outcomes-focused mentality: “We’d better as educators make sure that the student gaze we help ‘make’ is directed towards the outcomes we value and hope to see emerge in our students” (2008). Janes also argues that ideally, students should move beyond a “tourist gaze” to the development of a “studious gaze,” but demonstrates an understanding that student transformation is a process:

[Developing a studious gaze can be seen] as the first stage of a conscious process of attempted intellectual analysis in which the culture of the locality is not the object constructed by the gaze, but a meta-cultural construction in which what is being analyzed is the diversity of human social expression… to understand humanity itself (25).

In this sense, the shift in the students’ cultural gaze acts as a means of measuring student development and transformation. Prins and Webster (2010) offer two main evidences of a more nuanced perspective among their students: (1) a cognitive understanding of the interconnectedness between the US and their study abroad destination (rather than the illusion of disconnection associated with the tourist gaze) and (2) a behavioral demonstration of moving beyond “both the consumption of culture and doing something for rather than with others.” These relate to the mutuality and reciprocity of Buber’s You-world.

Tying into the theory of “third culture” formation (Citron, 2002), I posit that a “third cultural” gaze emerges, distinct of both the “tourist gaze” and the “studious gaze.” It is co-created by locals and foreigners who both share a transnational perspective on a particular place. Those utilizing a third-cultural gaze observe and interact with the world from a discerning distance, acquiring certain cultural aspects to absorb into the third culture, and leaving others behind (though not without commentary). The tourist gaze, while determined primarily by the tourist, directly affects the local culture. Urry argues that the tourist gaze informs the local community’s understanding of how to present themselves and how to profit from the creation of an attractive and marketable “authenticity.” The presence of tourists promotes a cultural “purity” and creates a system where locals enact tourists’ expectations in order to make a profit (Janes, 2008). From a post-modern perspective, tourists knowingly seek to be involved in creation of the meanings of localities. This reflects on the mutuality of the “I-You” basic word pair, in that each side seeks to shape the other, but power inequalities indicate an “I-It” treatment. Another dialogue that relates to the idea of “gazing back” is the argument that Americans go abroad in order to understand their own identity, ultimately discovered through the local gaze: “The critical encounter of study abroad was with the ‘American’ self” (Dolby, 2004, p. 173). Two authors posit different understandings of this: Kathryn Mathers, author of “Mr. Kristof, I Presume?” (2012) and Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa (2010), and Nadine Dolby, author of “Encountering an American Self” (2004). Nadine Dolby finds that Americans in Australia (especially those in her sample during the 9/11 tragedy) had to “become aware that they are not the sole authors of their assumed, national, ‘American’ identity.

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Instead they encounter a postnational reality, in which ‘Americanness’ is constructed (or authored) as much outside, as inside, the physical borders of the state” (p. 162). Mathers (2012) finds that Americans in Africa also undergo the same processes, but challenges their right to do so:

Americans go to Africa, the motherland, the placenta, to become reborn as more human, if anything sloughing off their cyborg natures, becoming naturalized humans, while Africans, just as they did for Tarzan, become more like animals, apes that the American can rescue so as to become more human (p. 30).

Though she acknowledges that Americans in Africa must confront their privilege and undergo personal transformation, she questions its legitimacy if it must come at a cost to others.

Scholars cite internal growth and perspective shifting as an indicator of moving away from the tourist gaze, from the It-world of experience. However, Buber contends the following of encounters based on “experience”: “All this is not changed by adding ‘inner’ experiences to the ‘external’ ones… and all this is not changed by adding ‘mysterious’ experiences to ‘manifest’ ones… O mysteriousness without mystery, O piling up of information. It, it, it!” Applied to study abroad, this statement contends that as long as encounters are based in It-world “experience” rather than You-world “relation,” it doesn’t matter if they move beyond the ordinary to find the extraordinary (move from “front regions” to “back regions”), and it doesn’t matter if there is deeply personal growth in tandem with external experience, it is all “things among things” (56). Buber’s standard for authentic encounter is nearly unreachable, which he acknowledges in his response to the “torturous duality” of It and You (69): “Genuine contemplation never lasts long; the natural being that only now revealed itself to me in the mystery of reciprocity has again become describable, analyzable, classifiable–the point at which manifold systems of laws intersect” (68). In this quote, Buber mentions intersectionality of systems, making a key point: it is not a simple “tourist gaze” that is problematic for the student abroad, but all of the intersecting systems that produce it and reproduce it. Consumerism is one of these intersecting themes, and when they coalesce the topic of the following section is born: the colonial student.

ColonialismColonialism is one of the most influential cross-cultural interactions: creating legacies of collection, re-arrangement, re-presentation, and re-distribution across the globe (Smith, 1999). Scholars who see study abroad as promoting a colonial system argue that international education does little more than recreate ethnocentric bubbles of comfort abroad, where students see their host culture from the proverbial “verandah,” meanwhile promoting infrastructures which “support the privileged position of the student over the local” (Ogden, 2002, p. 40). It is largely enacted by the colonial student-consumer, who demands a product that ultimately perpetuates the reversion to “a colonial discourse that is concerned with elitism and consumption” (p. 36). Ogden describes the colonial student as the following:

Colonial students yearn to be abroad, to travel to worlds different from their own, to find excitement, to see new wonders and to have experiences of a lifetime. They want to gain new perspectives on world affairs, develop practical skills and built their resumes for potential career enhancement, all the while receiving full academic credit. Like children of the empire, colonial students have a sense of entitlement, as if the world is theirs for

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discovery, if not for the taking. New cultures are experienced in just the same way as new commodities are coveted, purchased and owned (pp. 37-38).

Revisiting the idea of “terms” and understanding the host culture on “its own terms” or the student’s home culture’s “terms,” Ogden argues that colonial students socialize with local peers and interact with the local culture as long as it is on their own terms. Ogden finds the students’ social skills for local integration lacking. The transition away from seeing the world only on one’s own “terms” requires one to first overcome perceptions of risk and then step outside of the comfort zone. Ogden calls upon the study abroad field to discover what motivates students to do this. Ogden finds the colonial mentality not only in the student participants but also in the program organization. In terms of hiring for the local staff, he argues, “We hire for diversity of perspective and background but insist on socialization for similarity” (p. 43). The classroom sheds traditional forms of independent learning for more US-centric pedagogies. This does little to intervene in the students’ development of a “colonial student gaze,” Ogden argues, referring to John Urry’s “tourist gaze.” The study abroad programs fail to engage with the local communities in a mutually beneficial way: “Rather than positioning ourselves as contributing members of the host community and embedding our educational endeavor within the community consciousness, education abroad activities tend to linger on the economic and cultural periphery of our host communities” (p. 43). Ogden’s final judgment is harsh: “By imposing an American-ethnocentric, colonial system on the backs of our host communities and then to concern ourselves with issues of intercultural integration does little more than perpetuate notions of our own elitism, power, and domination.”

In a provocative speech “To Hell with Good Intentions” at the Conference of InterAmerican Student Projects in 1968, Monsignor Ivan Illich gave an unexpected suggestion:

I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which being an American gives you. I am here to entreat you to freely, consciously and humbly give up the legal right you have to impose your benevolence on Mexico. I am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the "good" which you intended to do.

Rather than encouraging American students to participate in humanitarianism to learn about their positioning and privilege, he entreats students: “Come to study. But do not come to help.” In the late 1960s, I imagine that coming to “help” was more similar to today’s humanitarian study abroad initiatives than coming to study. In referencing intercultural contact, Illich states: “You can only dialogue with those like you - Latin American imitations of the North American middle class. There is no way for you to really meet with the underprivileged, since there is no common ground whatsoever for you to meet on.” In the context of the colonial student, his points are on spot: according to Illich, student humanitarianism does little more than encourage American dreams of consumerist delights among the local upper-middle class and dangerous misunderstanding among the lower classes.

When consumerism and the tourist gaze collide, the colonial student is born. These experiences are had in pursuit of capturing a You-world relationship but end up ultimately trapped in the It-world. The colonial student, through consumption and the tourist gaze, makes

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local culture no more than means to an end. Schumacher (1973) describes the ultimate goal of the student as the following:

I think what they are really looking for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them. When a thing is intelligible you have a sense of participation; when a thing is unintelligible you have a sense of estrangement. “Well, I don’t know,” you hear people say, as an impotent protest against the unintelligibility of the world as they meet it. If the mind cannot bring to the world a set—or, shall we say, a tool-box—of powerful ideas, the world must appear to it as a chaos, a mass of unrelated phenomena, of meaningless events. Such a man is like a person in a strange land without any signs of civilization, without maps or signposts or indicators of any kind. Nothing has any meaning to him; nothing can hold his vital interest; he has no means of making anything intelligible to himself. (p. 89)

By using consumption and the tourist gaze as means to make the “strange land” intelligible, the colonial student sees only “chaos, a mass of unrelated phenomena, meaningless events.” As this process destabilizes students, it also affects the local population: “Imperialism and colonialism brought complete disorder to colonized peoples, disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their social relations and their own ways of thinking, feeling, and interacting with the world” (Smith, 1999, p. 28). By promoting these mentalities we validate patterns of human history that reinforce unjust borders and cultural hegemony, and instead of equipping students and causing critical thought we reinforce their beliefs in an uncontested worldview. Each of the three personas adopted by the student abroad that I have reviewed – student-consumer, student-tourist, and student-colonist – invalidate Buber’s tenets of reciprocity, wholeness, and process. The student-consumer invalidates the Buberian value of reciprocity by participating solitarily in the disengaged mainstream economy, rather than a close-knit economic ecosystem where they are consumer and producer. The tourist negates the Buberian value of process, the Kantian ethic, as the tourist gaze focuses only on the output of a captured, authentic, extraordinary experience. Finally, the colonial student rejects the value of wholeness, as colonialism is founded on the idea that the colonized are not “fully human,” thus justifying economic and political imperialism (Smith, 1999, p. 25). Additionally, each of these personas emphasizes the I over the Other. However, Buber combines them into a single unit – a “basic,” “primal” word. Clearly, analyzing the student independently misses a large part of the equation in Buber’s view. In order to really understand personas that emerge in study abroad, one must look into the social networks they inhabit. I will now turn to the empirical side of this study and the previous work by Stephen Bochner et al. about functional networks of students abroad.

ConclusionIn the Bochner et al. 1977 functional model for sojourner’s social networks, there exists explicit proof of the classification of international education in Buber’s I-You, I-It binary. In the Bochner et al. model, there are three networks: one personal, one utilitarian, and one recreational. The personal network, or the one closer to “I-You,” where relationships are reciprocated and based on wholeness, is generally monocultural. The utilitarian network, where others are seen as “means” to “ends” and “things among things,” is generally composed of individuals from the host culture. The recreational network, a social free-for-all, is multicultural. This empirically

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demonstrates the firm lodging of study abroad in the It-world; students may have I-You relationships abroad, but they are rarely with members of the host culture.

Buber would argue that as students experience the host culture in the I-It mentality, so their capacities for experiencing It and using It expand (p. 88), leading to a treadmill of mere acquisition and utilization of information. The more the students learn about the host culture, the more the culture can be seen as a “thing among things,” defined within a “Sometime” and “Somewhere.” Buber sees this development of the capacity to experience as “the obstacle: For the improvement of the capacity for experience and use generally involves a decrease in man’s power to relate” (p. 59). This calls international education to focus above and beyond building capacity for experience but instead on the building the capacity for relation. After all, as Buber reminds, “What counts is not these products of analysis and reflection but the genuine original unity, the lived relationship” (p. 70). I recognize this, which is why I focus on friendship patterns and not language acquisition or other student-centric endeavors.

Allport speaks to man’s ability to build relation in contact theory. To Allport, a set of optimal conditions provides the setting for the I-You relationship to begin. Allport’s point of contact is characterized by equal group status within the situation, common goals, emphasis on cooperation over competition, and explicit social sanction. From this point, intercultural contact can begin. Given that this state of initial equality exists, where all inequalities are hidden behind a “veil of ignorance,” Rawls can also assume that individuals will make a decision with the interest of the marginalized in mind. King also believed that a world of social justice and equality predicated the “beloved community” – the ultimate world of agape, or unconditional love. With an “I-You” primal state such as Allport and Rawls described, predictable and positive outcomes come as a result: equality, democracy, and sovereignty (and perhaps even friendship).

However, Pettigrew (1998) raises the same concern that Buber would: Allport and Rawls’ shared world of initial equality does not leave room for process. In some ways, Allport and Rawls are ends-focused theorists. In both their analyses, given inputs lead to given outputs. The inputs are but a stepping-stone to more significant ends. Buber would ask: are the inputs merely means? Gandhi would ask: are the means moral? Though Pettigrew argues that intercultural contact requires “active, goal-oriented efforts,” he also acknowledges the importance of means. As previously quoted, Pettigrew contends that, “The original hypothesis says nothing about the processes by which contact changes attitudes and behavior. It predicts only when contact will lead to positive change, not how and why the change occurs.” Pettigrew’s critique resonates with the discourse on study abroad regarding process and outcome. It is also resonant with the common-sense understanding of friendships in that the individuals within them must grow, change, reevaluate, and adapt together. On an institutional level, Reilly and Senders, authors of “Becoming the Change We Want to See,” list nine changes the Study abroad field should prioritize in order for it to answer problems of global concern. Under the sixth point, “Emphasize Responsibility,” they cite a recent vision for Global Citizenship from the Hobart and William Smith Colleges campus as a potential framework for “future planning and institutional change” (257). The vision for global citizenship asks the question: “We can privilege our students with worlds of opportunity: can we inspire them to live lives of consequence as global citizens?” This manifesto appears to take steps away from Martin Buber’s I-It world by implying that “experiencing” the other is not sufficient; instead, one must also take action that benefits others beyond themselves. However, in the list of characteristics of a global citizen, the following are listed:

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Global citizens understand themselves and their home culture. Global citizens have an in-depth understanding of another culture. Global citizens can work across these cultures with facility and ease.

These characteristics leave little room for personal development, and appear to be more of a checklist than anything else. In Janet Bennett’s article “Becoming a Global Soul” she implies by the title alone that a “global soul” is something one can become, a status that can be attained. It goes back to the criticism of “intercultural competency” which one can seemingly develop, complete, and appropriate. Though this vision for Global Citizenship acknowledges that relation must be built beyond experience, the authors do not see the importance of process, as their counterparts at the University of Minnesota do.

The authors of the University of Minnesota Studies in International Development Educational Philosophy describe their educational philosophy as a quest which they “never reach but toward which they continually strive.” Their goals are listed under a heading not labeled “Outcomes” but instead “Lifelong Habits of Thought and Engagement.” Just as Buber emphasizes authentic relation over experience-focused capacity-building, the MSID Educational Philosophy contends:

Transformation is about far more than the acquisition of specific knowledge and skills. It is about the spirit as well as the mind, about values as well as ideas, about relationships as well as self-knowledge, about action as well as understanding. Change happens; transformation is intentional. It is a response, an attitude. It is renewal and growth.

This philosophy finally touches on the ultimate point: the process is the outcome; the means are the end. Buber and Gandhi continuously advocated for equal emphasis on means and ends and on processes and outcomes. This is because, in the You-world, ends and means become singular; “the policy is in the implementation” (Schumacher 1973, p. 213); process and outcome are united.

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IV.Methods

OverviewIn my empirical research, I implemented the Bochner et al. methodology to analyze the friendship patterns of students participating in education abroad. While there are different ways to operationalize “study abroad” and different measurements of “intercultural contact,” I chose to study American students who are participating in one or two-semester study abroad programs and their friendship networks. Friendship networks can be measured using several different measurements, but I choose to measure them through a simple list of closest associates and closest friends. I also measured preferred companions for specific study abroad activities. I will use this data to demonstrate elements of Allport’s Contact Hypothesis and Buber’s I-Thou framework in my study abroad sample. In the present study, friendship represents the “I-Thou” relation and the elements of transformation – learning about self, the Other, and the interconnectedness between them. It represents process, reciprocity, and wholeness. By studying student’s friendship patterns abroad, and the nationality of their friends, I can see what kind of larger relationship students have with their time abroad. Companionship preferences will reveal in what cases students do prefer host nationals and the relationship will become even clearer. In addition, qualitative material will support the narrative as a whole.

TheexperimentalsettingandstudyabroadpopulationThe population included all students at American universities who studied abroad for either Fall 2011 or the full 2011-2012 Academic Year. The data collection for the present study took place in January and February of 2012. Most respondents attend The College of Wooster, a four-year liberal arts school in rural Ohio. During the 2011-2012 school year at The College of Wooster, there were 163 students who went abroad. 7 went for a full-year program. This value represents just fewer than 10% of the college population. Students who go abroad at The College of Wooster are roughly 60% female and 40% male. Their most common fields of study are Anthropology, English, History, International Relations, and Sociology. For the 2011-2012 year, the most popular destinations are Australia, Denmark, England, France, New Zealand, Scotland, and Spain. Three times as many students go abroad in the Fall than go abroad in the Spring.

Nationally, the most popular destinations for American students are the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France, and China, in rank order (Chow and Bhandari, 2011, p. 18). In 2009-2010, these five destinations accounted for over 40% of students. The destinations that rose greatly in popularity were Israel (60.7% change) and India (44.4% change). The students who go abroad are 36.5% male and 63.5% female. Most students in baccalaureate programs participate in semester long programs or short programs, and only 4.3% participate in long-term programs.

Study abroad programs include direct enrollment, island, hybrid, and field-based programs. In direct enrollment programs, students enroll in local universities directly. Island programs have an American-run institution where students have classes with an American cohort. Hybrid programs include both of these options and field-based programs include experiential learning.

ThesurveyinstrumentThe survey instrument (found in Appendix 3) for this research involves general questions, three tables based on the Bochner et al. survey, and demographic questions. The participant gave

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consent to be a part of the survey by agreeing to six statements listed before starting the survey, which specified that the participant would receive no benefit nor harm from the survey’s completion and the eligibility requirements of the survey. Students were eligible to take the survey if over 18 years of age and if they participated in a study abroad program for Fall 2011 or the 2011-2012 Academic Year. General Questions Following this, in the introductory questions, participants listed their host country name, nationality, length of stay, which activities they are frequently involved in, and what kind of accommodations they have. They also describe their preparation by listing their initial goals for their time abroad and whether they had family or friends from their host country prior to departure. Finally, their future dedication to cross-cultural interaction is assessed through questions about their career and intentions to live abroad long-term. The next section assesses their overall experience. The participant is asked to tell their abilities regarding the host country language and their satisfaction with various aspects of their study abroad experience.

Figure 6: Example "Satisfaction" section

Top Associates and Top Friends Tables In the first table (see Figure 8), the participant lists the five people with whom they spend the most time. For each “associate,” the student lists the individual’s gender, nationality, relationship, and age. An identical matrix follows, in which participants list their five closest friends. An additional column asks participants to indicate whether the person was previously listed on the table of associates.

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Figure 7: Association patterns

In the next table, participants identify who is their preferred companion for a designated activity. There are 14 activities total. The participants list certain characteristics about their preferred companion (a real and not hypothetical person). They list the companion’s gender, age, nationality, and relationship to the respondent. They also have the opportunity to list whether they do not participate in the activity, have no preferred companion, or prefer to do an activity alone. While the table is based on the Bochner et al. original (1977), I changed the 14 activities to reflect current social trends. This process will be described in the section on Procedure below.

Figure 8: Preferred companion table

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This survey was designed using a free, online survey software called Qualtrics. I also designed the survey on Select Survey and SurveyMonkey, and concluded that Qualtrics was best suited for my research.

Subjects185 people filled out a significant part of the survey and 162 completed it. The gender ratio in my sample was 5:1 female to male. The mean age was 20.5 years, with a range of 19 to 23. Over ¾ of respondents were in the class of 2013, or junior class standing, with only 4 college sophomores and 18 college seniors. The College of Wooster accounted for 61 responses, with 5 or more responses from Ashland University, Oberlin College, and the University of Minnesota.21

All respondents were US citizens, except one British, one Greek, and one Portuguese student, though all were enrolled in American universities.22 The students reported studying over 30 fields, and 16% responded “Other,” which will represent even more. The most common responses were Anthropology (8%), Education (8%), Psychology (7%), Political Science (7%), and History (6%). While social science dominates the top five, Health Science, Life Science, and Earth Science are numbers eight, nine, and ten, respectively.

ProcedureFirst, I uploaded a written version of the survey using the internet application. I adapted the Bochner et al. survey, with attention to Furnham and Alibhai’s version. Using the preliminary survey from my Junior IS, I was able to determine what sort of clarifications and changes needed to be made. To give an example, the list of activities has varied between the different surveys that Furnham and Alibhai, Bochner et al., and I have administrated. In the table below (Table 5), the activities listed on each respective survey instrument have been recorded.

Activity

Bochner et al. (1977)

Furnham & Alibhai (1985)

Valencia (2011)

Present Study

Shopping X X X X Swimming X Picnic X Sports X X Library X Concerts X Cooking X X Drinking X X Late evening snack X Just talking X X X Just being with X X X

21 Other universities with more than 3 responses were Cleveland State University, Drake University, Grand Valley State University, Union & Hobart & William Smith Colleges. Students from over 25 other colleges and universities based in the US responded. 22 For the purposes of this study, I will be including the three “Other Nationals” in my description of American students abroad, as they attend American universities.

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Getting help with a language problem X X X X Getting help with an academic problem X X X X Getting help with an emotional problem X X X X Getting help with an interpersonal problem

X

Dating X X X Go to the movies X Go to a disco or party X X Attend a place of worship X Go into a pub X Visit the doctor X X X Eating street food X Going out to eat at a restaurant X X Going on a hike X X Driving around town X Sightseeing/attending a cultural event X X Eating a home-cooked meal X Celebrating a local festival X X

Total 15 10 15 14 Table 5: Activities listings across Bochner et al. (1977), Furnham & Alibhai (1985), and Valencia (2011)

The original list was changed for a few different reasons. First of all, the activities that people participate in socially have shifted, as has the language used to describe them. Bochner et al. refer to nightlife as “Drinking,” Furnham and Alibhai differentiate between “Go to a disco or party” and “Go into a pub,” and I used “Drinking on the weekend” in my 2011 survey. In the present study I used “Partying on the weekend” because of its all-inclusive colloquial meaning, relevant to people who both go out and stay in and both those who drink alcohol and don’t drink alcohol. Another reason I changed aspects of the list is the students in the sample are different than the surveys that Bochner et al., Furnham and Alibhai, and I administrated. The students who Bochner et al and Furnham and Alibhai sampled were “majority world” students studying in the West. The students I sampled in 2011 were students from all over the world, predominantly the West but also including Africa and the Middle East who were in a specific state in India. The sample of the present survey is American students “abroad,” which includes destinations on every inhabited continent. I needed activity categories that applied to students participating primarily in cultural exchange and secondarily in academia. A note on categories is that the meaning of the activity can change based on the destination. While for Furnham and Alibhai and for Bochner et al., “Cooking at home” often symbolized home culture rehearsal; for Americans living in India, eating at restaurants served this purpose. Only at restaurants can Americans get food such as pizza, brownies, and other “comfort food.” For this reason, I included both “Going out to eat at a restaurant” and “Eating a home-cooked meal” to see how location affects preferred companion. I removed “Driving around town” and “Eating street food” from my 2011 survey as they may principally apply to students living in India. The considerations I included while developing the list of activities for preferred companions can be generalized to the survey design as a whole. After getting HSRC approval, I

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distributed the survey to a small test group and incorporated their input into the design. I started survey distribution on Monday, January 30th, 2012 with the goal of finishing data collection by February 15th, 2012. Before beginning survey distribution, I met with several people who would later help me in survey distribution. In December, I went to a study abroad regional directors’ meeting as a guest of my college’s study abroad director. I spoke to the staff of several different university Off-Campus Studies departments and collected contact information for about ten directors of off-campus studies’ offices at various schools locally. I also went to a study abroad returnees’ function and alerted the students that my survey would soon be sent to them electronically. I requested students not only to fill out the survey, but also to share it on social networking websites with their program cohort. This type of distribution is called “snowball” distribution, in that survey respondents led me to other survey respondents. I also contacted friends-of-friends at the University of Minnesota, Grand Valley State University, and the University of Texas-Austin who were in administrative positions and could distribute my survey to students. Finally, I requested friends from my study abroad programs who are enrolled at various universities across the U.S. to distribute the survey to their friends. In this way, not only was I studying social networks, but even my distribution was powered by social networks. I distributed my survey with an introduction paragraph to the groups listed above. This included over a hundred College of Wooster students and administrative allies at over 15 other schools. Within four days, I had over 100 responses. The data has been analyzed using the data analysis program Stata. I cleaned the data in sets as it came in and checked for accuracy. For example, students who didn’t participate in a work experience would often put “1 out of 5” for their satisfaction with co-workers. I altered satisfaction scores to reflect involvement; if the student did not participate in said activity, they received a missing variable so as not to sway results. Similarly, if a student went to an English-speaking country I listed their language skill as “native” by default. These sorts of small changes made the data set more representative of the sample and removed weaknesses in the survey instrument.

TestinghypothesesI am testing three independent variables and two dependent variables, as seen below. Independent Variables

• Host Country Accessibility: This variable measures how far outside of a student’s comfort zone the host country destination is. Highly accessibile destinations are comparable to the United States in terms of language, Westernization, status on the Human Development Index, and presence of a largely White population.

• Program-level integration: This variable measures how much the program sponsors host community integration. It is the aggregate of participation in shared housing with locals, direct enrollment at a local university, and working or volunteering at a local NGO or company.

• Individual-level variables: Aspects of the individual tested (controlling for the two conceptual variables above) include gender (control), language abilities, desire to build relationships, desire to have personal growth, previous experience, relevant future plans, and enrollment in a liberal arts institution.

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Dependent Variables • Friendship Patterns and Association Patterns: This is a measurement of a student’s ratio

of US national friends/associates to host national and other national friends/associates. • Companionship preferences: Regarding a specific activity, a student’s preference for (a) a

companion, no companion, or no particular companion and (b) if a particular companion, the nationality of the companion (home vs. host vs. other)

Hypotheses H0A= A student’s host country, program, and personal characteristics are independent of

their friendship and association patterns. H0B= A student’s host country, program, and personal characteristics are independent of

their companionship preferences.

H1A= A student’s host country is related to their friendship and association patterns. Increased host country accessibility will be related to increased friendship and association with locals.

H1B= A student’s program is related to their friendship and association patterns. Increased

program-sponsored community involvement will be related to increased friendship and association with locals.

H1C= A student’s personal characteristics are related to their friendship and association

patterns. Increased language abilities, increased desire for community engagement, previous experience, and relevant future plans will be related to increased friendship and association with locals. Increased desire for personal growth will be related to increased friendship and association with US nationals.

H2A= A student’s host country is related to their companionship preferences. Increased

host country accessibility will be related to increased desire for local companions for intimate activities and decreased host country accessibility will be related to increased desire for local companions when they are “gatekeepers.”

H2B= A student’s program is related to their companionship preferences. Increased

program-sponsored community involvement will be related to preference for local companions.

H2C= A student’s personal characteristics are related to their companionship preferences.

Increased language abilities, increased desire for community engagement, previous experience, and relevant future plans will be related to preference for local companions. Increased desire for personal growth will be related to increased friendship and association with US nationals.

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V.Findings

Describingthedataset:Programs,activities,andaccommodationThe most popular destinations were Australia (n=17), India23 (n=11), Italy (n=11), and the UK (England, Ireland, and Scotland; n=21). Countries with more than 5 respondents included Chile (n=8), Denmark (n=7), Ecuador (n=8), France (n=5), Indonesia (n=5), Morocco (n=5), New Zealand (n=6), Spain (n=7), Thailand (n=6). Other countries which are represented are Argentina, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal, Senegal, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, Tanzania, and Vietnam. Three students participated in multi-country programs.

Eighty-seven percent of students went on one-semester programs; the remainder went on two-semester programs except for two students enrolled a 4-year abroad degree program. In my sample, students who were abroad two semesters were much more likely to be located in a non-traditional destination. The country with the highest representation of two-semester students was India. The mean amount of total time spent abroad in the host country was 4.7 months, with a maximum of 25 months.

The most common programs were Arcadia and SIT, each with over 20 students around the globe enrolled. IES had 18 students. DIS, MSID, and ISDSI were each represented with several students.24 More than 30 additional programs were represented.25 27% of students went to a destination where they were already a native speaker of the language. 28% reported advanced or fluent language skills in the host country language. 20% reported intermediate language skills and 25% reported beginner or advance beginner language skills. The tables below show the respondents’ participation in various program-level activities and accommodation.

Program-level activity (f)n=162 % of respondents

Independent, informal travel (with friends, family, or alone) 140 82%

Taking classes with a Study abroad program 113 66% Group travel (formal, with program) 110 64% Taking language classes 98 57% Taking classes at a local university 71 42% Research 49 29% Interning or working 36 22% Other (note: text entries ranged from student teaching to knitting) 14 8%

Volunteering (6-10 hours a week) 12 7% Table 6: Participation in program-level activities

23 As India was my study abroad destination, it is the country where I have the strongest networks for survey distribution. This accounts for the overrepresentation of students who went to India in my sample. 24 School for International Training (SIT), Danish Institute for Study Abroad (DIS), Minnesota Studies in International Development (MSID), International Sustainable Development Studies Institute (ISDSI). 25 38 students did not list a program name.

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Accommodation (f) % of respondents

Host family 68 42% Apartment/dorm with program-mates 49 30% Apartment/dorm with local students 30 19% Apartment/dorm with mixed students 8 5% Mix and match 5 3% Apartment alone 2 1% Total 162 100% Table 7: Student accommodation while studying abroad

In this study, “program-level” indicates formal activities that students participate in as part of their programs or that were endorsed by their program. This often reflects more about the student than the program as students self-select into programs that meet their needs and interests. Accommodation is also a program-level distinction.

Respondents’cross‐culturalbackground,expectationsandsatisfactionStudents chose three of nine suggestions for primary reasons for going abroad. The following table shows which “reasons” were chosen with the highest frequency in a student’s “Top 3.”

Reason for going abroad % of respondents

To grow as a person, find personal meaning, and self-understanding 59% Academic purposes, intellectual pursuits 48% A new challenge, achievement 38% To learn and use a new language or skillset 32% To experience an exotic, foreign place 31% To engage and integrate with a new community 29% To build relationships and meet people different from myself 28% To explore and develop a new and different side of myself 18% Career goals, vocational exploration 17%

Table 8: Top 3 reasons for going abroad

The first three represent individual exploration. The next four represent interactional experiences. The last two are less concrete versions of the reasons relating to individual exploration. This ranking may represent an emphasis of “me” over “we” in reasons for studying abroad.

The mean overall satisfaction, rated on a 5-point scale from ‘very unsatisfied’ to ‘very satisfied,’ was 4.6. No respondent listed 1 out of 5 and only one respondent listed 2 out of 5. Social life satisfaction was rated at 4.1, with two listings of 1 and six listings of 2. The mean satisfaction with comfort in public was 4.1, with a .6-point difference between majority White countries and majority non-White countries. Students had a mean satisfaction of 4.3 with meaningful cross-cultural interaction, and a mean satisfaction of 4.2 with personal mobility and daily ease of living.

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Whether students were enrolled in a local university, an American island program, or both, their mean academic satisfaction fell between 3.5 and 3.6 out of 5. For those who reported working or volunteering with a company or a non-profit organization, the mean satisfaction with work experience was 3.7. The mean satisfaction with relationships with co-workers was 4.19.

Language acquisition satisfaction was directly related to language abilities. Students with intermediate, advanced, or fluent language skills rated language acquisition above 4 out of 5. The mean satisfaction for students with advanced-beginner skills was 2.75 out of 5, and those who were beginners had a mean satisfaction of 2.1 out of 5. Those enrolled in language classes had a higher mean satisfaction than those who were not enrolled in language classes by .3 points.

Satisfaction with relationships with housemates had a mean of 4.1 out of 5. Accommodations with above-average ratings were host family (4.2) and apartment/dorm with mixed students (4.4). Accommodations with average ratings were apartment/dorm with local students, apartment/dorm with American students. Accommodations that were a mix of the above listed choices had a below-average mean satisfaction (3.6), though there was also the highest standard deviation (1.7).

GeneralassociationpatternsStudents were asked to list the five people with whom they spend the most time, which are referred to in the present study as “associates.” A total of 722 associates were listed by 155 respondents. Of the associates listed, 385 (53%) were Americans, 264 (37%) were host nationals, and 73 (10%) were other nationals. 24 respondents associated with 0 Americans and 20 respondents associated with only Americans. 36 respondents associated with no host-nationals and 5 respondents associated with only host-nationals. 108 respondents associated with 0 other-nationals and 2 respondents associated with all other-nationals.

The association rate is determined by dividing the amount of associates who belong to a certain category from the total amount of associates (up to 5). Thus, the individual who has 2 associates (1 conational, 1 host national), and the individual who has 4 associates (2 conational, 2 host national), will have equal conational association rates (.5). The conational association rate is the amount of Americans listed as people with whom the respondent spends the most time. The mean association rate is .53, so of the 5 people who a student abroad spends the most time with, on average over half are Americans. The mean association rate for host nationals is .37, so on average nearly 2 of 5 people who the student abroad spends the most time are host nationals. The mean rate for association with other nationals is .1, so less than 1 out of 5 associates of students abroad are neither from the US or the host country.

GeneralfriendshippatternsRespondents were asked to list up to 5 of their closest friends. 134 respondents listed a total of 626 friends. Of the friends listed, 406 (65%) were Americans, 167 (27%) were host nationals, and 53 (8%) were other nationals. 14 respondents reported having 0 American friends while 32 reported 5 out of 5 of friends American. 53 respondents reported having 0 host country friends, while 5 reported having 5 out of 5 host country friends. 91 respondents reported having 0 other national friends and none reported having only other national friends.

The friendship rate is determined by dividing the amount of friends who belong to a certain category from the total amount of friends (up to 5). The mean co-national friendship rate is .65. The mean host-national friendship rate is .26. The mean other-national friendship rate is .09. This means that the average student has 3 American friends and 2 foreign friends.

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Companionshippreferences&activityparticipationRespondents were asked to list their preferred companion for a particular activity. If they did not participate, did not have a preferred companion, or preferred to participate alone, they were requested to respond as such. There were fourteen activities listed (see Table 9).

The activities that garnered near full participation (0-4% “Do not participate” response) included sightseeing and attending a cultural event, just being, just talking, eating a home-cooked meal, going out to eat at a restaurant, celebrating a cultural festival, and going shopping. Activities which had between 5% and 10% “Do not participate” response included getting personal support, partying, getting academic help, and playing sports or going on a hike. 15% of respondents did not participate in going to the doctor or getting language help, and 20% did not date while studying abroad.

Some activities were less social than others, as measured by the propensity of respondents to wish to participate “alone.” The activities with the highest response rate of “Prefer to participate alone” were Going to the Doctor (17%) and Shopping (14%). The most social activities were partying, going to a restaurant, just talking, getting language help, dating, and going to a local festival. Over 98% of respondents wished to have a companion for each of the aforementioned activities. Survey respondents listed “Prefer to participate alone” between 4% and 8% of the time for the remaining six activities.

Finally, for certain activities, respondents were more likely to feel strongly about preferring a certain individual, while for other activities, the presence of a specific companion was less important. This is measured by how often participants listed “No preference” for an activity’s companion. These activities can be split into four categories: “Very Intimate” (91-100% of respondents preferred someone specific), “Intimate” (86-90%), “Semi-Intimate” (81-85%) and “Non-intimate” (<80%). Very Intimate activities include personal support, going to eat at a restaurant, and going shopping, for which a specific companion is preferred over 91% of the time. Intimate activities include eating a home-cooked meal, partying, going to the doctor, dating, and sightseeing or attending a cultural event. Semi-intimate activities include getting help with language, playing sports or going on a hike, getting academic help. Non- intimate activities include celebrating a local festival (80%), just talking, (71%) and just being (67%).

• Conational Orientation: Students abroad prefer their co-nationals to a foreigner, being alone, or a random person for 10 of 14 activities (see chart below). Of the first five activities that students prefer a co-national, four are listed as “Very Intimate” activities above.

• Host national Orientation: Students abroad prefer host-nationals to an American, being alone, or a random person for 4 of 10 activities. Only one of these activities is considered “Intimate” or “Very intimate” activities. The activities for which locals are least preferred include Just Talking (17%), Shopping (18%), Just being (18%), Personal support (19%).

• Other national orientation: There are 0 out of 14 activities for which students prefer other nationals to host-nationals or co-nationals. However, the activities with the highest preference rates for other-nationals (6-7%) are eating a home-cooked meal, partying, sightseeing or attending a cultural event, language help, and dating. Other-nationals are least preferred (3%) for personal support, shopping, and going to the doctor.

In the table below, activities are arranged based on the sample’s orientation towards conational, host national or other national companions. For example, going to a restaurant has a strong

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conational orientation. 66% of people prefer American companions. 21% of people prefer host national companions. 4% of respondents prefer other national companions. 9% prefer to be alone or have no preference. Culture of Companion

American companion

Host national companion

Other national companion

To be alone or no preference

Conational orientation Going to a restaurant 66% 21% 4% 9% Personal Support 63% 19% 3% 15% Partying 62% 20% 7% 11% Shopping 56% 18% 3% 23% Dating 52% 29% 6% 13% Sports or going on a hike 51% 24% 4% 21% Just talking 48% 17% 5% 30% Sightseeing or attending a cultural event 46% 28% 7% 19% Host national orientation Language help 15% 62% 6% 17% Eating a home-cooked meal 30% 47% 7% 16% Going to a festival 32% 41% 4% 23% Non-specific national orientation Just being 37% 18% 4% 41% Going to a festival 32% 41% 4% 23% Academic help 33% 35% 5% 27%

Table 9: Companionship Preferences

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Summaryofpartialcorrelations The following table tracks which independent variables had the highest quantity of significant relationships with companionship preferences, in terms of number of activities affected. This table is organized by the quantity of activities are affected by the independent variable. The number in the cell below the variable is the internal ranking of the strength of the activity’s relationship, as compared to the other activities. The “total” row lists how many independent variables the activity is related to, and the “total” column lists how many activities each independent variable affects. The relationship is considered “significant” and therefore ranked on the table if it passes the Chi-squared test. US Friendship Rate most affects companionship preferences and Language most affects participation. The activity most affected was eating a home-cooked meal.

Table 10: Partial Correlations between independent variables and activity companionship preferences and participation

Table 11: Partial Correlation between independent variables and activity companionship preferences and participation

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RelatingsocializationpatternsandactivitypatternsAs one would infer, the makeup of the social networks a student spends time with highly affect their companionship preferences, though the direction of the relationship between association rate and friendship rate is indeterminate. Socialization patterns (Friendship Rates and Association Rates) have two of the strongest relationships to companionship preferences. Friendship Rates are related to 10 of 14 activities and Association Rates are related to 6 of 14 activities. However, the makeup of the social networks does not impact the participation in the activities as much as it impacts the companionship preferences.

Independentvariable1:HostcountryaccessibilityThe variable “Host country accessibility” measures the relative ease with which the typical American student abroad can integrate into the host culture. Destinations are measured on a scale of “Low,” “Medium,” “High,” and “Full” accessibility. This variable reflects several aspects of the host country. Countries are considered accessible based on the acceptance of English as a national language, the country’s ranking on the Human Development Index, the ability of a typical study abroad student (White female) to blend in physically, and whether the country is culturally Western. The following table reflects the categorization of each host country.

Low Accessibility (n=46)

Medium Accessibility (n=32)

High Accessibility (n=37)

Full Accessibility (n=44)

Kenya (n=4) Nepal (n=1) Senegal (n=3) Tanzania (n=2) China (n=4) India (n=11) Indonesia (n=5) Morocco (n=5) Samoa (n=4) Thailand (n=6) Vietnam (n=1)

Brazil (n=3) Costa Rica (n=1) Ecuador (n=8) Mexico (n=1) Israel (n=1) Japan (n=1) Singapore (n=3) South Africa (n=3) South Korea (n=2)

Denmark (n=7) France (n=5) Germany (n=3) Hungary (n=3) Italy (n=11) Spain (n=7) Switzerland (n=2)

Australia (n=17) UK (n=21) New Zealand (n=6)

Table 12: Categorization of Host Countries based on Host Country Accessibility

Accessibility&satisfactionTable 12 shows the results of a pair-wise correlation between Host Country Accessibility and the ten satisfaction variables. In more accessible host countries, students have higher satisfaction with comfort in public (.40), personal mobility and ease of daily tasks (.28). With increased access, satisfaction with cross-cultural interaction decreases (-.24). Satisfaction overall, with academics, and with coworker relationships have minimal correlation to host country accessibility.

Satisfaction pwcorr Comfort in Public 0.3996 Personal Mobility 0.2777 Work Satisfaction 0.1559 Social Life 0.1426 Relationships with coworkers 0.0538 Academic Satisfaction 0.0260 Overall Satisfaction -0.0281 Relationships with housemates -0.1158 Language Acquisition -0.1233 Cross-Cultural Interactions -0.2353

Table 13: Pair-wise Correlation of Host Country Accessibility and Satisfaction

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Accessibility&friendshippatternsOn the checklist of reasons for going abroad, students were over twice as likely to respond affirmatively for “to build relationships with people different from myself” if they were going to a full-accessibility country or a high-accessibility country rather than a medium-accessibility country. However, students with these destinations had lower rates of non-American friends, as seen in the table below. The table demonstrates the friendship patterns for each category of host country accessibility. For example, students who went to low accessibility countries had a 44% association rate with Americans and a 57% friendship rate with Americans. Their association rate with host nationals was 47% while their friendship rate was 36%. Their association rate with other nationals was 9% while their friendship rate was 6%. The table below shows the friendship rates with all three national origins for each category of host country accessibility.

With Americans With Host Nationals With Other Nationals Host Country Accessibility

Association Rate

Friendship Rate

Association Rate

Friendship Rate

Association Rate

Friendship Rate

Low 44% 57% 48% 36% 9% 6% Medium 52% 67% 43% 28% 6% 5% High 58% 72% 27% 17% 15% 11% Full 58% 64% 32% 25% 11% 11% Average 53% 65% 37% 26% 10% 9% Table 14: Host country accessibility & friendship patterns

Students in highly and fully accessible countries both have a similar association rate with Americans, but the friendship rate for students in highly accessible destinations is 72% while for students in fully accessible locations it is 64%. Students in fully accessible countries have a below-average host-national association rate at 32% but an average friendship rate at 25%. The tables below reflect the students on either end of the spectrum of host-culture integration: those who have no host culture friends and only American friends (“US-Oriented Students”) versus those who have only host culture friends and no American friends (“Host-Oriented Students”). In low, medium, and fully accessible regions, 1 in 4 students (25%) have only American friends. However, in highly accessible countries, the rate is much higher, at 44%. It appears that with increased host country accessibility, or with increased host country comfort, students have decreased association with host nationals. This indicates that I should accept the null hypothesis and decide that a country that is more comfortable for students will not necessarily provide more friends. It also appears that significant portions of students will have no host national friends regardless of the destination. Host Country Accessibility

No Host National Associates

No Host National Friends

Only US Associates

Only US Friends

Low 15.00% 32.26% 10.00% 25.81% Medium 10.71% 30.43% 10.71% 26.09% High 38.24% 56.25% 23.53% 43.75% Full 28.57% 36.84% 21.43% 26.32% Average 23.61% 39.52% 16.67% 30.65% Table 15: US-Oriented students

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Host Country Accessibility

No US Associates

No US Friends

Only Host Associates

Only Host Friends

Low 22.50% 12.90% 15.00% 12.90% Medium 7.14% 8.70% 3.57% 0% High 11.76% 9.38% 0.00% 0% Full 9.52% 10.53% 7.14% 5.26% Average 13.19% 10.48% 6.94% 4.84% Table 16: Host-Oriented students

Accessibility&activityparticipationStudents were able to choose whether they preferred to participate in an activity alone, preferred not to participate, preferred a particular companion, or participated socially but had no preferred companion. Host country accessibility did not affect activity participation for most activities, but for a few it was significant. Getting academic help had a statistically significant decrease in intimacy with increased accessibility, which may demonstrate that the individuals who go to less mainstream destinations need more specific “gatekeepers.” Personal support saw an increase in desire to be alone with decreased accessibility to the country, which may mean that those who go to less comfortable countries have better self-support ability. The opposite trend occurred for going to the doctor: participation decreased with country accessibility and desire to go alone increased. Participation in dating also decreased with increased country accessibility. Finally, as the country becomes more accessible, a specific companion is less important for “Just being,” perhaps demonstrating that the experience is more within the individual’s comfort zone.

Accessibility&preferredcompanionsFour activities shifted strongly in favor of American companions with increasing host country accessibility, though only 2 are statistically significant: eating a home-cooked meal and celebrating a local festival.26 One activity shifted strongly in favor of host country companions with increasing host country accessibility. These results are visually represented below. Though some of the trends are non-linear, the difference between low accessibility and full accessibility is notable. Because of the small sample and high standard deviation, only two of the fourteen activities (eating a home-cooked meal and sightseeing) are have Chi-squared significance at .05. However, the remaining trends have marked differences. As students step further out of their comfort zone and go to a less accessible country, Americans are often less preferred as companions. For eating a home cooked meal, language help, going to a festival, and sightseeing or attending a cultural event, Americans are more preferred in highly accessible countries than in less accessible countries. However, for sports or going on a hike, the more accessible a country is, the Americans are preferred less. For the rest of the activities, the host country is not related to preferred companion. 26 In this study, statistical significance is found by completing a Chi-squared analysis for crosstabs. Degrees of freedom are found by calculating the number of columns minus one (k-1) times the number of rows minus one (n-1). Using a chi-square F-value chart, the appropriate critical region is determined. The Stata-generated Chi-value is compared to the critical region, and if it is larger, the null hypothesis (there is no relationship between the independent variable and the activity) is rejected. The activities which have undergone this process are described as “significant” or “statistically significant” from here on.

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Figure 9: Companionship preferences & host country accessibility

IndependentVariable2:Program‐levelhostcultureintegrationI created a “Program” variable that measures the relative integration students undergo in the host community on a programmatic level. If programs arranged for students to participate in local university courses, volunteer locally, work or intern at an NGO or a company, do research, or live in the company of locals (either in a host family or in a dormitory/apartment), they had increased program-level integration. This variable has a pair-wise correlation with the Host Country Accessibility variable of -.27, or a slightly negative relationship, which is different enough to analyze program and host country separately with minimal error.

Program&friendshippatternsThe following table (Table 16) reflects the friendship patterns of students within different programs. For example, students with no program-sponsored integration have a 63% association rate with Americans with a 72% friendship rate with Americans, and a 19% association rate with host nationals with a 16% friendship rate with host nationals. With Americans With Host Nationals With Other Nationals Program Integration

Association Rate

Friendship Rate

Association Rate

Friendship Rate

Association Rate

Friendship Rate

None 63% 72% 19% 16% 18% 12% Low 68% 80% 23% 14% 9% 6% Medium 44% 58% 47% 32% 9% 9% High 44% 52% 43% 38% 12% 10% Average 53% 65% 37% 26% 10% 9% Table 17: Program-level host culture integration & Friendship patterns

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

Low Medium High Full

% o

f Pre

ferr

ed C

ompa

nion

s AM

ER

ICA

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Host Country Accessibility

Companionship Preferences & Host Country Accessibility

Eating a home-cooked meal

Language help

Going to a festival

Sightseeing or attending a cultural event Sports or going on a hike

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The following tables (Table 17 & Table 18) tell the story of the sample at either end of the spectrum: those with no host national friends and only co-national friends (US-oriented students) and those with no co-national friends and only host national friends (Host culture-oriented students). It appears from the data that increased program-sponsored community integration is related to both association and friendship rates, in that of the students who have no program-level integration, none have no US friends. While 22% of those with high program-sponsored community integration have no US friends. Program-level integration

No Host National Associates

No Host National Friends

Only American Associates

Only American Friends

None 50.00% 60.00% 25.00% 30.00% Low 40.48% 59.46% 26.19% 45.95% Medium 12.86% 28.33% 11.43% 23.33% High 8.70% 27.78% 8.70% 22.22% Average 23.13% 40.00% 16.33% 30.40% Table 18: Program-level host culture integration & rates of US orientation

Program-level integration

No American Associates

No American Friends

Only Host Associates

Only Host Friends

None 8.33% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% Low 7.14% 0.00% 2.38% 0.00% Medium 11.76% 9.38% 11.34% 6.67% High 17.49% 22.22% 4.35% 11.11% Average 12.93% 10.40% 6.80% 4.80% Table 19: Program-level host culture integration & rates of host national orientation

Program&activityparticipationA few participation trends were related to program type. First, sightseeing or attending a cultural event was more often participated in by students of non-integrating programs than those of highly-integrating programs. This may indicate distance from the host culture or a student-tourist role. Preference for a specific companion increases with program integration for the activities “Eating a home-cooked meal” and “Celebrating a local festival,” which may demonstrate that students in highly integrating programs have increased respect for host nationals demonstrated by their increased perception of intimacy. The only activity with statistically significant participation difference was language help, for which increased program integration caused increased participation (See Table 10).

Program&companionshippreferencesWith increased program-sponsored community integration, several activities demonstrate an orientation “flip,” in which the majority preference response switches from American to host national. These activities include “Sightseeing or attending a cultural event,” “Eating a home-cooked meal,” “Celebrating a local festival,” and “Dating.” Sightseeing and dating both passed a Chi-squared test on statistical significance. Two that do not perform a complete flip but demonstrate an increase in preference for a host national companion include “Just Talking” and

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“Personal Support.” Due to a small sample and a high standard deviation, none of these trends is statistically significant, though they are notable.

Figure 10: Program type and companionship preferences

This again suggests that with increased program-sponsored integration, students become more open to sharing more intimate activities with host nationals, or perceiving them as more intimate. I reject the null hypothesis that program and companionship preferences are unrelated, and confirm that with increased integration, students are more oriented towards host nationals.

IndependentVariable3:IndividualOpennessA respondent’s association and friendship rate with Americans is highly negatively

correlated to his or her association and friendship rate with host nationals (-0.8215 and -0.8659 respectively, p-values=0.00). Therefore, I will only report individual influences on association rates and friendship rates with Americans, and the reader can infer the impacts on association and friendship rates with host nationals.

In order to determine the individual influences on association and friendship rates, I used several variables. First, I included my host country accessibility variable (hcrc) and my program integration variable (progrc) to control for country-level and program-level influences. Next, I added seven non-correlated variables:

• Sex: the sex of the respondent • Lang: the language ability of the respondent

(Beginner, Advanced Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Fluent, Native Language) • Futplan: the future plans for cross-cultural relations of the respondent

- Their rating on the scale below for “Living abroad long term (5-10 years)” multiplied

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

None Low Medium High

% o

f Res

pond

ents

pre

ferr

ing

AM

ER

ICA

N

com

pani

on

Level of Program-level Student Integration in Host Culture

Program Type and Companionship Preferences

Shopping

Personal Support

Eating a home-cooked meal

Sightseeing or attending a cultural event

Going to a festival

Sports or going on a hike

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by their rating on the scale below for “Following a career that involves cross-cultural relations” - (Very Unlikely, Unlikely, Somewhat Unlikely, Neutral, Somewhat Likely, Likely, Very Likely)

• Prevex27: Previous experience before going abroad with host nationals - If they have host national family (dummy) + if they had friends from the country before going (dummy)

• Libarts: If the home institution is a liberal arts school • Rgrowth: If one reason for going abroad was “Personal growth” • Rrelate: If one reason for going abroad was “To build relationships with people different

than me” These seven variables capture individual characteristics, background, and intention related to cross-cultural interaction. The equation below represents expected signs.

Friendship/Association with US Nationals = F [host country accessibility - program-level integration - language - relevancy of future experiences - previous experience + liberal arts + “personal growth” priority - “building relationships” priority]

IndividualOrientation&FriendshipPatternsThe following diagram shows the results from a Probit analysis. This demonstrates that

the friendship rate with Americans (frateUS) is most significantly affected by program-level integration, the desire for personal growth and the desire for building relationships. “Program” has a negative sign, showing that the more the program includes integrative aspects, the lower the friendship rate of students with fellow Americans. Personal growth has a positive sign, demonstrating that if a student’s focus is on “me” rather than “we,” they will have higher friendship rates with Americans. The opposite occurs if the focus is building relationships.

Variables that are not statistically significant but are relevant include sex and language background. Females have higher rates of friendship with Americans as do those who are less nuanced in the local language. Statistically insignificant variables include host country accessibility, future plans, previous experience, and attending a liberal arts school. Naturally, the coefficients for all variables are negligible. As for association rate (arateUS), none of the variables are significant. Therefore, individual-level variables affect friendship attainment but not association patterns.

27 Interestingly, no one in the sample had both friends and family from their host country.

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Table 20: Stata analysis of individual-level variables

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IndividualVariables&CompanionshipPreferencesSex Males and females did not have strikingly different preference for companions. For 11 of 14 activities, men more often answered “No Preferred Companion” than women did. The only activity which had statistically difference in participation between men and women was eating a home-cooked meal, which men were more likely to answer “Alone” and “No Preference” than women. Men and women have statistically significant differences in companionship preferences for two activities: eating at a restaurant and celebrating a local festival. Men prefer host national companions for eating at a restaurant, while women prefer Americans. The opposite is true for celebrating a local festival: men prefer Americans while women prefer host nationals. Language Language abilities were measured on the following scale: Beginner, Advanced Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Fluent, Native Speaker. Interestingly, language learners (those who fall in the first five categories) and native speakers (the last category) have different trends. Those who are fluent in the host country language as a second language, as opposed to a first language, have a stronger host culture orientation. For example, for sightseeing or going to a cultural event, the percentage of respondents who prefer a specific companion decreases with language ability, from 91.67% at “Beginner” to 60.00% at “Fluent.” However, for native speakers, the preference rate is back up to 84.29%. Therefore, for social activities, language fluency is key, yet more so in terms of second-language learners than native speakers. Language abilities have a stronger relationship to activity participation than to companion preference. It is related to five activities in terms of participation, and to two activities in terms of companion preferences. Increased language abilities indicate increased participation in language help, academic help, and going to the doctor. Increased language abilities indicate decreased intimacy of playing sports or going for a hike, and decreased participation and sociality of shopping. Participation and companionship preference for “Just being” changes based on language ability, though the “native speaker dip” does not occur, perhaps as it is not a highly social activity. As language ability increases, so does desire to be alone (from 0% for Beginners to 20.00% for Fluent speakers, with a decreasing score for Native speakers at 5.26%). The response of “No Preferred Companion” increases with language ability. While only 10.00% of Beginners have no preferred companion, Advanced Beginner, Advanced, and Fluent speakers all answered between 30.00%-39.99%, and 42.11% of Native speakers did not have a preferred companion. This may demonstrate an expanding comfort zone with increasing language familiarity. With increased language abilities, students had a nearly statistically significant increase in host national companions for celebrating a local festival. There was a statistically significant increase in host national companions for eating a home-cooked meal and for just talking, though there is a notable “native speaker dip” present. Native speakers responded less favorably toward host cultural companions as compared to the average for 9 of 14 activities. The most notable “Native speaker dip” in host-cultural companion preference are for partying (Fluent, 44.44%; Native, 20.59%), Sightseeing or attending a cultural event (Fluent, 50.00%; Native, 21.21%), eating a meal (Fluent, 90.00%; Native, 26.27%), academic help (Fluent, 90.00%; Native, 36.84%), celebrating a local festival (Fluent, 75.00%, Native 42.62%), dating (Fluent, 57.14%; Native, 32.00%), and just talking (Fluent, 57.14%; Native, 19.23%).

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Future Plans This variable reflects an individual’s likelihood to follow a path of cross-cultural exchange or expatriotism in the future, and has the strongest impact on companionship preferences of any individual level variable. It is measured by a respondent’s self-rated likelihood to live abroad long term (5-10 years) multiplied by the likelihood of cross-cultural interaction in a future career. Those with higher scores will find their study abroad experience more relevant to their future goals. The scale of relevancy includes “None”, “Low,” “Medium,” “High,” and “Very High.”

Future plans did not significantly impact participation in any activity, but it did impact companionship preferences for 7 of 14 activities. With increased relevancy of future plans, the preference for a host culture companion increased for partying (None, 5.88%; Very High, 22.69%), sightseeing or attending a cultural event (None, 14.29%; Very High, 52.00%), celebrating a festival (None, 45.45%; Low, 16.67%; Very High, 73.08%), and dating (None, 18.18%, Very High, 40.91%). Additionally, it has a nonlinear relationship with language help and shopping. For many activities, the “Low” category has the lowest preference of host-country nationals, even lower than “None.” Previous Experience Previous experience did not have any statistically significant relationship on preferred companions, but it was related to participation for both eating a home-cooked meal and just talking. Those with previous experience reported less participation in just talking. They also reported less intimacy and need for a companion for eating a home-cooked meal. Liberal Arts Enrollment in a liberal arts home institution is related to a change in participation in only one activity – eating a home-cooked meal – and is not related to companionship preferences for any activities. This indicates that enrollment at a liberal arts institution is not a significant variable in terms of study abroad companionship preferences. “Me” vs. “We” Since students were able to choose 3 of 9 reasons for going abroad, the analysis for the me vs. we section would be very difficult, and I will leave it to the I-It I-Thou discussion in the next chapter.

ConclusionIn this Findings section, I first described the data, and then introduced the three conceptual variables: host country accessibility, program-level integration, and individual-level influences. The more accessible a host country or the less integrated the program, the less likely a student is to mix and make friends with locals. 24% of students do not associate at all with locals and 47% have no local friends. The make-up of a student’s social networks is highly related to their companionship preferences, which for 10 of 14 activities are in favor of American companions. In the next chapter, I will split up the activities into activities that play using the Buber I-It/I-Thou binary and analyze the data within the theoretical frameworks previously investigated.

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VI.Discussion

As I settle in here, the sights and sounds of Jaipur are no longer novel. It is not so much exhilarating to walk down the street as it is exhausting. The dirt, the staring crowds, men calling out wanting to know “Which country, which country?” And, “would I like an [overpriced] rickshaw ride? Madam, madam, hello?” The honking, constant honking of cars, scooters, motorcycles, and rickshaws. The beggar children, chided by their reclining parents to follow us barefoot for blocks and blocks and blocks. A vacation is very much in order, and upon my return I can look forward to all the best parts of being settled into this Indian life… coming home to home cooked Rajasthani food twice a day– warm cipatti, spicy vegetables, sweets; knowing where I can find a decent cup of coffee in this city and being recognized as a regular after two visits; greeting the neighbors with a few broken phrases of Hindi and being understood; vaguely knowing my way around this crowded metropolis; having hours upon hours to read and write and think; accompanying my family to temples and markets and parties; finally being able to slow down my Western mind and become accustomed to the pace of life here. It’s good, it is so good. (August 2011)

IntroductionIn this chapter, I will analyze the quantitative data from my Findings chapter within the framework outlined in my Theory chapter. The above quote introduces several impacts on the student that will be investigated presently: flux in identity between tourist, student, and resident; the simultaneous desire to both be a “regular” and to maintain the privilege of escape; and a exciting yet demanding clarity of positioning. In this chapter, I will first speak to the relationship between a student’s social surroundings, measured in the present study as association and friendship patterns, and his or her cross-cultural behavior as understood through companionship preferences. I ultimately will conclude that while country, program, and individual-level variables affect cross-cultural contact, they do not explain it completely. Second, I will demonstrate that study abroad is firmly rooted in the It-world by analyzing the statistical relationships elicited from the students’ approaches to different activities. Third, I will look into the You-world activities and compare the outcomes with Pettigrew’s four transformative processes. Finally, I will propose my own model for cross-cultural contact abroad. Each analysis will be completed with quantitative data described in the Findings chapter and complemented by qualitative data from student writing.28 However, before diving into the discussion, I will briefly discuss the limitations of my research and speak to its ability to be generalized.

StudyBiasThe main bias in this study is the sampling method. Because of my limited social networks and time, I was only able to reach out to those who I already had relationships with, creating a sample with a large Ohio-based contingent, a large India-destined contingent, and a female bias. Because I used the survey respondents to help distribute the survey, it may be swayed in favor of those who built close relationships to Americans and were therefore more likely to pass on my

28 The student writing in this section has been edited to remove indicators of a student’s host country and program. Additionally, since the writing was posted hastily on personal blogs, I have attempted to repair typos and grammatical errors.

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survey to their study abroad friends. Finally, my choice to implement an already-existing survey (Bochner et al., 1977) before delving into the theory created a few mismatches that could be improved in a later incarnation of this work. That said, I believe that my results are representative of a diverse sample with varied experiences, and that my sample is large enough to have legitimate heterogeneity. Access to student blogs also has enhanced my understanding of the survey respondents, and has given me an opportunity to compare how they represent themselves qualitatively and quantitatively. I do see my own limitations in terms of framing qualitative material, as I am likely to be biased my own study abroad experience in India and Argentina and theoretical foundations. Additionally, I recognize the danger of using a single quote to represent a larger experience. In the following pages, I will use quantitative material to interpret the theory and use supportive qualitative material to flesh out the narrative of Americans studying abroad.

Categorizingactivities:Experiencevs.RelationThe It-world is manifested through two already-existing theoretical frameworks: the student-as-consumer and the tourist gaze. The three activities which best fit into the student-as-consumer model are shopping, eating at a restaurant, and sightseeing / attending a cultural event. Each of these activities has high participation and a majority of respondents who want to participate in this activity with co-nationals (see Table 9). Additionally, country-level and program-level variables do not demonstrate relationships, while individual-level do slightly (see Table 10). The next category, tourism-based activities includes eating a home-cooked meal, celebrating a local festival, and getting help with language. Host nationals are most preferred for each of these activities, and each activity is highly statistically related to country, program, and individual-level variables. Consumption-based and tourism-based activities are the two parts of a broader “Experiential” category, and friendship patterns, association patterns, or both affect five of the six activities. Finally, the “Relational” category includes personal support, just talking, and just being. Personal support is a highly intimate activity, with high participation and strong U.S. preference. Just talking and just being both have strong “No Preference” responses, but also very low host preference rates, demonstrating that these activities are both low in intimacy and low in cross-cultural encounter. To review, nine activities have been selected to fit into three categories: two experience-based categories (consumption and tourism) and one relation-based category. Some activities are not included because they lack statistically significant relationships with my independent variables, specificity, or relevancy. Below, a chart includes the remaining nine activities along with certain descriptive information. “Participation rates” refer to the amount of students who responded in the affirmative regarding participation in the activity. In order to obtain “Orientations,” which are the general tendency towards companion nationality for each activity, the activities were ranked in descending order based on the response rate for “American companion” and “Host National Companion” (the ranking is designated by the “#” sign). “US Preference” means the respondent listed an American companion, “Host preference” means they listed a host national companion, “Other preference” is an other national companion, “No preference” means they do not have a preferred companion, and “Alone” means they prefer to complete the activity alone. The Chi2 significance listings include each of the independent variables whose F value was larger than the critical region given the relevant degrees of freedom, thus demonstrating the existence of a relationship. The relationship is measured in terms of significance but not in terms of directionality in a Chi-squared test. The italicized variables listed under Chi-squared significance are not significant at .05 as the rest are, but still have a strong relationship. Each of the variables listed is described in detail in the Methods chapter.

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Figure 11: Applying theory to companionship preference

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Student‐as‐ConsumerStudents act primarily as consumers while participating in three of the fourteen activities tested: eating at a restaurant, shopping, and sightseeing/attending a cultural event.29 This analysis will focus on eating at a restaurant and shopping, which had more significant relationships to the independent variables. Sightseeing/attending a cultural event does not show strong statistical ties to any country, program, or individual-level variables. Both shopping and eating at a restaurant are considered very intimate and have a strong preference for conational companions. These activities can embody both host cultural exploration and conational home-cultural rehearsal. Though in the Bochner et al. study, cooking at home was valued as a time for foreign students to reenter the comfort zone, for students living in host families, eating at a restaurant may more accurately embody cultural rehearsal. Shopping30 may mean buying host cultural trinkets or clothing, personal necessities, or home cultural goods such as peanut butter.

At any rate, consumption-based activities are dominated by monocultural relationships and place the host culture in a transactional role. For the 23% of students in my sample who have only American associates, over-the-counter interactions may be the only cross-cultural contact a student has. Companionship preference patterns for both activities are significantly related to the amount of exposure a student has to Americans, and a student’s participation in eating out is also influenced. This demonstrates that both of these consumption-based activities are “ingroup” activities, as increases in “ingroup” exposure causes increased participation.

In transactional relationships, host cultural individuals are defined by their roles, making these relationships fairly clear-cut and easily negotiated, especially when formalized and part of a larger institution. For students whose only cross-cultural contact is transactional, the implicit monetization of these interactions may affect the way that students perceive the host culture as a whole. In consumption-related activities, students become acutely aware of privilege and power, especially when they perceive that host nationals are trying to “take advantage” of them. The influence of the transactional encounter, which in one’s home country would be little more than routine, is reflected in student blogs. Below, both positive and negative transactional encounters are described:

While we were attempting to buy really cheap cell phones … [my program-mates and I] met Jamie, who's in the middle of his freshman year at [a local university]. So between the phone, answering all of our dumb questions about everything related to [our host country] and checking us out, we spent about 45 minutes talking to him and distracting him from doing his job. (July 2011, Oceania)

29 Eating at a restaurant is the activity with the strongest preference for American companions, and is also considered very intimate (low rate of “No Preference” responses) and very social (low rate of “Alone” responses). Eating at a restaurant is significantly influenced by sex: women prefer Americans and men prefer host-nationals. It is significantly related to a student’s friendship rate with Americans (Chi-squared significance at .001), as well as association rate with Americans. Students who associate with more Americans have increased participation in eating at restaurants; students with more American associates and friends have significantly increased American companionship for this activity. Shopping is considered a very intimate activity, though with a higher “Alone” response rate. Language learners participate in this activity significantly less, and are more often to prefer to shop alone. 30 Please see the appendix “Case Study: Shopping” for an excerpt from my Junior IS

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No matter how nicely I try to treat drivers, they always ask seem to ask for money for things that are already included in their pay, things that they wouldn’t ask a more experienced or local person for. I oblige because through my American eyes they deserve a bigger paycheck, but it is a little hurtful that we show them what we mean to be kindness or friendship and they seem to do that in return… One could argue that it is part of the cultural experience, but that gets frustrating when you are the inexperienced buyer. (August 2011, Asia)

Though these selections are part of a wider experience, the importance placed on transactional interactions in student writing highlights the way that students find more meaning in everyday interactions abroad than they would at home. Additionally, students often use monetary measures as adjectives for their experiences (a 5-rupee flower, “chump change” purchases). For student-consumers, the rate of cross-cultural exchange may become nothing more than a reflection of the exchange rate. In addition, the often mentioned protagonist who goes shopping, takes a taxi, drinks at a pub, travels, or eats at a restaurant— “We” and “Us”—is generally a group of study abroad program mates or flat mates, whose experiences would be very different if not travelling en masse. This creates an interaction that is beyond I-It: it becomes Us-It, and students’ purchasing power is magnified by the size of their group. The Us-It model is necessitated by the fact that consumer transactions are operated on the host cultural “terms.” One’s own cultural “terms,” manifested in ethnocentrism, run the risk of becoming the currency for students’ intercultural interactions when they are bound in the role of student-as-consumer. The fact that American companions are so adamantly preferred for consumption-based activities demonstrates that students prefer host nationals as facilitators to these experiences, rather than as co-consumers. In my experience, when talking to other Americans, students will quickly revert to home currency: “It was 40 rupees, kind of a lot, but it’s only like one dollar, right?” This monetary code switching is something students abroad prefer to participate in within themselves. It becomes an important part of group cohesion. Below, there is an example of the importance of transactional interactions to having shared experience as a group. On a list of the most memorable and representative experiences that a group of students had while abroad, six of the twelve listed experiences were transactional in nature:

• When you put on a seatbelt in a taxi, the driver laughs at you and undoes the buckle for you

• Both the doctor and nurses do not respond to the fact that you’re bleeding into your IV for 20 minutes because it’s their lunch break (Yes, the girl in question is totally fine. Just a little bit of a scare.)

• While vomiting on the side of a road in the desert, a man approaches you and offers to sell you scarves

• The security guard at a Roman ruin site isn’t yelling at you to get off of the 2,600-year old statue that you’re climbing on; he’s wondering if you want your picture taken

• A group of taxi drivers take a break to eat couscous together on Friday on their knees in a circle because they can’t be home with their families

• A cobbler repairs your shoe after sitting, chatting, and drinking coffee with him for 20 minutes and when you try to offer him money, he denies it. “He didn’t

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want my money; he said it was just nice to talk to me.” (December 2011, North Africa)

To conclude, the main activities representing consumption are eating at a restaurant, going shopping, and sightseeing / attending a cultural event. When students operate as consumers, they create set of primary interactions with Americans and secondary interactions with host nationals. The quantitative data provides an empirical check on this model. Since country and program-level variables are not significantly related, I can conclude that the student-as-consumer is unaffected by host country destination and program-level integration. Instead, individual-level variables affect these activities, though they do so inconsistently. In order to determine the larger scope of student-consumers, I would have to compare them against short-term tourists and long-term expatriates to determine their unique situation. In addition to my quantitative data, my qualitative data also supports the student-as-consumer narrative by demonstrating that transactional encounters not only exist, but also impact students. Transactional interactions are memorable, act as a frame for future interactions, and play into a larger “Us-It” mentality. When a student’s cross-cultural exposure is limited to consumption-based, transactional encounters, the tragedy is not only that the potential for individual and social transformation is limited, but also that already existing power structures and legacies of privilege are reinforced.

Student‐as‐TouristThe tourist gaze is a lens through which individuals seek authenticity in a foreign locale. The tourist gaze affects not only the students and their perception of their experiences, but also the host culture and the way it performs the notion of “authenticity.” Several scholars argue that the tourist gaze does not apply to study abroad; instead, the “studious gaze” does (Janes, 2001; Wilkes, 2008; Prins and Webster, 2010). Four activities tested in the present study represent the “student-tourist gaze”: language help, celebrating a local festival, and eating a home-cooked meal. Each of these activities involves the student interacting as an outsider with the host community, seeking authentic cross-cultural learning in a non-monetary interaction. Eating a home-cooked meal and celebrating a local festival are the two activities with the strongest relationship to the country-level, program-level, and individual-level variables tested. 97% of respondents participated in celebrating a local festival and 99% participated in eating a home-cooked meal, and they were the third and second most popular activities for a host-culture companion respectively. For both of these activities, increased host country accessibility and increased US association were related to a decrease in host-national companions: students already outside of their comfort zones were able to stray further from their American cohort. As program integration increased, the “No preference” response rate decreased, demonstrating that these activities were considered more intimate when students have increased program-level host-culture integration. Men considered eating a home-cooked meal less social and less intimate than women did, and preferred to celebrate a local festival with Americans more than their female counterparts. “Celebrating a local festival” is described below in quotes from respondents’ blogs:

And of course during the actual mass I couldn’t understand a thing because it was almost all in [the local language], but my sister had the song book and I would sing along even though I had no idea what it meant. But it was a very uniting feeling and I enjoyed

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feeling such a part of my family and the village in that way. (Fall 2011, Oceania) Previously I wrote to you about Purnama, or full moon festival, which consisted of our group, along with many [locals], wading through waist-high pools in order to purify ourselves by washing under numerous water spouts. It turns out that holy water is a really important part of more regular [local] prayer too. A couple weeks ago was the second Purnama to occur during my time here, and I went with my family to Goa Gajah, or Elephant Cave, in order to pray there. After observing the other villagers for a while, my family and I entered the small, crowded cave. (December 2011, Asia) In celebrating a local festival and eating a home-cooked meal, the lines between “Us” and

“Them” are blurred. The student is highly aware of their personal difference from the local community, but feels engaged and respected when they are involved in the celebration and meal. Though they see their lack of understanding as a limitation, it only frames the extraordinariness of the experience. The experience is brought into the comfort zone by the company of conationals and validated by the participation of host nationals.

Meanwhile, eating a home-cooked meal can mean different things for different students. For some it is an opportunity to retreat into a comfort zone where comfort food can be cooked independently, and conationals can be invited for home culture rehearsal. For others, it is a cross-cultural experience that is merely a part of a daily routine when living with a host family (especially those with in-home help). It also can be a unique experience that is perceived as a special display of host country hospitality, as seen below:

At one point I walked to the kitchen to ask Fay (the sweet, sweet woman taking care of me that day) if I could have some toast or something to eat. She said, “Yes, yes of course, just one minute.” So I sat and waited and then maybe 10 minutes later she brings me a [local] feast on a tray. There was a plate of 4 bananas and a cut up mango, rice, a cooked egg, chop suey, and salad. And I kid you not, I ate almost every single scrap of food on that tray. But I wanted to share that gesture with you so that you all at home can get an idea of how hospitable and sweet and nonchalant about their hospitality people are here. I ask for a piece or 2 of toast, and I’m prepared and brought a platter of the perfect foods (literally everything was exactly what I wanted). (Fall 2011, Pacific)

In low-accessibility countries, students have increased privilege but decreased ability to

provide for themselves. The rate of students who preferred to eat a home-cooked meal with a host national increased from 23.33% in full-accessibility countries such as Australia to 80.56% in low-accessibility countries such as India; celebrating a local festival increased from just over 30% in full and high-accessibility countries to over 70% in medium and low-accessibility countries. Although host nationals are socially distanced from the students, in a country where students stick out physically, are not able to speak their first language, and are in a non-Western culture, locals are even more vital gatekeepers. The tourist gaze becomes even stronger as the host nationals become even more instrumental in attaining goals. However, even though students recognize the temporality and privilege associated with their international sojourn, they do not

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see themselves as tourists and they desire to assimilate as much as possible. One student wrote in her blog that her future quasi-Danish self will laugh at the tourist she once was. Students will conclude at the end of a blog entry “It was very Aussie Day” about a day spent completely with Americans, or tweet as a group “#ThisIsMorroco” when an experience particularly resonates.

Even if students strive to move beyond tourism, it hardly makes a difference to host nationals who will treat all foreigners mostly the same, causing confusion for students whose identity is in flux. The resentment against tourists is augmented with the realization that tourists’ behavior impacts the host perception of their ingroup negatively. Students frequently cite cross-cultural contact as the differentiating factor between their group and the tourists, as Prins and Webster (2010) also observed. Below, several students comment on cross-cultural interactions framed by confused identities between “tourist” and “student.”

Covered with Europeans in their combinations of wifebeaters and salwar pants, people were too familiar with tourists for my liking. (I just realized that I might have thought differently of [the city], perhaps seen the tourism through a different perspective, if I had perhaps just gone there on vacation with my parents before starting to live here this year. I definitely see my views changing.) (October 2011, Asia) When I was checking in [to my departing flight], the number of American students in the line really pissed me off. Hearing the American accent so loudly in one place was annoying and wrong sounding. They were just all over the place yammering on about everything they did and all the places they saw. All I could do to keep from screaming was think to myself, they didn’t make [local] friends like I did. The five of us [Americans] sat in a little circle together near a café for a while, and I was extremely thankful that we had that time together. To cheer ourselves up, we re-enacted the dances the guys do and talked about some funny memories. But I could tell that we were all emotionally hollow. Seriously we just couldn’t accept that our group was about to be broken apart. (December 2011, Western Europe)

Though 53% of students in my sample reported having only American friends, I would posit that the vast majority of students would identify themselves as something more than “tourists,” evidenced by the blog entries above. However, when transactional and instrumental cross-cultural contact dominates a student’s experience, it is hard to argue that there is a sufficient cross-cultural relationship to move students beyond a “tourist gaze.” Some indicators of moving beyond the tourist gaze (such as recognizing plurality and questioning identity) will be discussed later in this chapter.

To conclude, American companions dominate consumption-based activities such as shopping and eating at a restaurant, while for cultural engagement activities such as eating a home cooked meal or celebrating a local festival, local companions are preferred. Bochner et al. would see this as a differentiation of functions, but as Warren Nilsson, the author of Organization Unbound questions, at what point do functions become roles? Both functions and roles are eschewed by Buber, as they fail to represent wholeness, reciprocity, and process, and instead bind an individual within their spatio-temporal context. Further, both host nationals and conationals are necessary in activities even where they are not preferred. In consumption-

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activities, host nationals are required for transactional relationships. In gaze-based activities, conationals are required to provide a standard by which to measure the extraordinariness or representativeness of an experience. Believing one is having a transformative time abroad through consumption and enhancement experiences is based on conational perception and host national cooperation in every instance.

CombiningtheStudent‐ConsumerandStudent‐Tourist:TheUltimateIt‐World

I begin to realize what an incredible experience I am having here. The [ice cream] shop owner is watching [local] music videos, with two other men who are giving us curious looks. I wish I had my camera with me so I could take a photo of them as Ludacris comes on the screen surrounded by [local] dancers. They wonder why we are here, I’m sure. Thankfully the scantily clad white women in the music video are more interesting to them than the fully clothed, considerably less sexualized white women in their shop (…) We finish our ice cream. It’s now dark as we leave the shop. I am sure I will be nostalgic for this moment at some point in my life, so I try to take in as much as I can, navigating around a fruit stand and a man fixing a bicycle with grease stained hands. My feet are immersed in flowing rain water, the streets still acting as de facto rivers that will take me home to hot chapatti and stuffed peppers. (September 2011, Asia)

The student-consumer and the student-tourist are not two separate personas, but interrelated manifestations of the I-It experience. The students flow between host-culture and home-culture dominated worlds, seeking simultaneous but separate authenticities. For example, the student in the above anecdote transitions from the activity “eating at a restaurant” which I have labeled conational consumption to “eating a home-cooked meal” which I have labeled host national enhancement. Yet, the student has written more about cross-cultural interaction relating to eating ice cream out than the home food, to which the author is passively taken by the rivers of monsoon, where she is provided with hot chapatti and stuffed peppers. In the process of “eating at a restaurant,” the author feels evaluated and compared to the white women on the television, causing discomfort. She wishes she could capture the cognitive dissonance of American hip hop in India by taking a picture. In contrast, the home-cooked meal is described as cross-cultural only in experience and not in relation. The experiences that students have in transactional interactions may influence their ability to relate in more meaningful opportunities.

Additionally, the student does not value her experience at its present value, but instead by a potential future nostalgia. The consumer mentality of “taking in as much as I can” and the tourist gaze implied in the subtext are unified in this single entry. The student-consumer is driven by quantity and diversity of experiences. Because of the temporality of studying abroad, there is a permanent sense of urgency, with an overwhelming sense of security in returning home. This reflects the two aspects of study abroad that make it unique in cross-cultural sojourns: the limits of time and assurance of returning home. Students reflect on how limitations become clear to them in their blogs:

My existence in these final days of my semester is focused on trying to soak up every ounce of the local culture I possibly can, but reminders of Ohio are being piped into the

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background, pulling my thoughts back home. (December 2011, Western Europe) The past few weeks, I’ve had this “we are only in [this city] for three more months, let’s try to explore and experience everything we possibly can in those three months” attitude. (December 2011, Asia)

At times, this can cause angst and emotional turmoil. The drive for maximum experiential consumption, visible cultural adaptation, personal growth, and deeper global understanding burden the student abroad. However, as seen below, these burdens are often eased not through increased cross-cultural interaction and depth of relation, but through a retreat into the familiar:

At times I HATE India. Like this afternoon, all I wanted to do was put in my headphones and surf the web for a while—check out, disengage from India. But at the exact same time, I love it. So many people have told me how they have a strong love/hate relationship with India. A few hours ago I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. But sitting here, explaining the last month of my life to you people, I understand it completely. It’s something you want to escape from, yet at the same time it’s something you want to soak in with every part of your being. (January 2012) I think that at the end of nine months, I will probably be in love with India. I sometimes feel like I am already, like today when I got a really nice oil head massage, [my American friend] and I saw most of an amazing kathak performance, and I was able to squeeze in a good workout at the gym. Most experiences here, whether it be the sangeet or nritya shows, fresh food or beautiful scenery, are unique to India. However, I know that currently I am more infatuated with Hindustan, because I haven’t come to the stage (perhaps yet) that I can, for example, just accept the customer service where the waiters ogle and enjoy my meal. (September 2011)

Ultimately, what the student wants to consume is something that is beyond the tourist gaze. They want to fall in love, to absorb everything, to accept the uncontrollable. However, trapped in the dual roles of student-consumer and student-tourist, they are unable to remove themselves from the cycle of I-It. The second student quoted is clearly disturbed by disempowering transactional interactions. Yet, if the ultimate goal is personal and social transformation through authentic encounter, the goal is not for students merely to realize they have privilege but for them to experiment with moving beyond it. The fact that they can escape into the Internet or take a vacation and come back and fall in love again (demonstrated in the quote above and the quote at the beginning of this chapter) is the problem not the solution. Students continue to maintain power in both the consuming and gazing aspects of experience-based interaction, and even though they may realize it, are not skilled enough to move beyond it.

I‐thouBoth the tourist gaze and student-as-consumer operate in a world of I-It, reinforcing already existing power structures and divisions. Rather than making legitimate connections, there is an increased ability to categorize others as “things among things.” Wholeness and reciprocity are

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not inherent in either of these relationships. The activities that have the strongest potential for an I-Thou relationship are personal support, just talking, and just being. Just being and just talking have full participation, while personal support has high participation. Personal support, just talking, and just being are all in the top four activities for which locals are least-desired companions. None of the three activities have statistically significant relationships to either host country accessibility or program-level host country integration. However, there is a strong relationship between program-sponsored host community integration and the desire for “Personal Support” and “Just Being” with host-culture members. Integrative programs are more able to open students up beyond their comfort zones: students with no program-level host culture interaction had zero responses of wishing to just be alone; they require constant companionship. In addition, the friendship rate with Americans has a significant relationship with all three activities: increased American friends was related to increased US companionship preferences.

“Just Talking” has a complicated case of the “Native Speaker Dip” when considering the relationship between language study and companion preferences. The average rate is 24.44% preference for host nationals. However, within the language background categories, Beginners report 56.56%, Advanced Beginners 0.00%, Intermediate 27.78%, and Fluent 57.44%. With the exception of the outlier “Advanced Beginners,” all language learners have an above average desire to “Just talk” with locals. Native speakers, however, prefer a local 19.23% of time, which is below average. Though “Just talking” should be in the comfort zone for native speakers more than anyone else, it has a below average rate of preference for locals. These sorts of “Native Speaker Dips” are prevalent throughout the sample and may reflect individual-level differences beyond language abilities. This exemplifies the complicated nature of “I-Thou” activities. The outcomes of an I-Thou relationship reflect Pettigrew’s four processes of contact theory: learning about the outgroup, changing behavior, ingroup reappraisal, and generalization of outgroup learnings to extended outgroups. In the table below, these processes are represented as Pettigrew labeled them, as they would appear in study abroad, and as they appear in blogs. Pettigrew’s Process

Transformation in Study Abroad

Qualitative examples

1. Learning about the outgroup

1. Learning about positioning relative to the host culture

While I had known that different people can live contentedly in completely different ways and places, Lotofaga was a chance for me to actually live that other way and realize that besides the material things, they have so much in terms of strength and community and peace that we do not have at home. (November 2011)

2. Changing behavior

2. Increased self-awareness, attention to cultural norms

[In a list of “Things I’m Nervous About”] Host family: I’m not so much scared of them, but scared how I will appear. Will I unwittingly bring that American sense of entitlement? How will I accidentally insult them? Can I fit right into the family, or will I be the literal white, cultural elephant in the room? (August 2011)

3. Ingroup reappraisal

3. Increased understanding of positioning related to the world or conationals

However, I try to remember that I am probably amongst the elite back home. My life here, taking cyclewallahs everywhere etc. is probably more akin to someone who has to take public transportation, say goes to work on the DART, and lives in a less serene (knock on wood) city than my beloved suburban town. (September 2011)

4. General- ization of

4. Taking a personal experience and expanding

[In a list of “Life Lessons”] Size matters. Denmark is small, or rather, the United States is huge.

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outgroup learning

it beyond the self Look at a map, and this will seem like an obvious statement. But it really makes all the difference when you’re talking about politics or anything of national significance. (December 2011)

Figure 12: Applying Pettigrew (1998) to study abroad, with qualitative examples

In less technical language, students abroad are able to learn about their host country, demonstrate behavioral adaptation, reappraise their conational group or national identity, and understand the interconnectedness of their host culture and other foreign cultures with their own. Each of these outcomes is indeed demonstrated in the blogosphere, and although my empirical data does not represent these processes, as an important part of the study abroad story, it is important to include this aspect of cross-cultural contact. Struggles with privilege and power come before, during, and after the international sojourn. Students who demonstrated a pre-departure understanding of positionality varied from a student crossing the Atlantic for the first time to a student returning to the country of her parents’ origin. Students learn about their relative position in their host culture and their relative position in their home culture. They learn about system-level interactions between their home and host cultures. All of this causes crises of identity for the students, who feel like they must transition from some sort of static state of “Americanness” to “Global Citizenship.” At times they feel like this is a distinct possibility, and at times it becomes a burden. In the literature, scholars say that there is a progression between sympathy and empathy (Engle & Engle, 2002; Reilly & Senders, 2009; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011). Sympathy is a conclusion that “We are all the same after all,” while Empathy is a conclusion that “We are all different, so let’s celebrate it,” and both are found in the blogs (even within a single sentence). While sympathy dwells within a comfort zone, inviting others formerly considered the outgroup inside of it, it does little to meet others in the middle. Empathy, however, steps out of the comfort zone, invites others to do so as well, and they meet together in no man’s land – where no one is comfortable. The edge of the comfort zone is where dialogue takes place and where learning curves are steepest. Yet, despite these interactions, many blogs conclude with the ultimate “But”: I love this long list of things about my host country (including unique experiences I’ve had, people I’ve met, and food I’ve eaten).

But I miss permanency, I miss my family, I miss my hometown, and I absolutely can't wait to see my friends [from my hometown] at New Years and my [college] friends in January. I love Australia, but I've missed the stuff that really matters. (November 2011)

But… this time abroad does not count as “Real Life.” Though I have spent countless effort seeking the “real me” and having “real” experiences, this semester is but a blink of an eye. At some point, students must return to the “ordinary,” if only to remind themselves what it is. The time for this comes with heartbreak: students at some point realize in a pseudo-existential crisis they will never be able to be authentically “local,” neither according to themselves or their hosts:

With this newly reached comfort level and a sense of autonomy, however, comes a nagging dissatisfaction from the continued isolation of being a foreigner. No matter how used to walking down the street I become, I will never have the same cultural access as the people around me. They will still stare. They will still laugh when I use [local] words. I will still feel uncertain wearing [local] clothes. When I spend time with the girls [at my NGO placement], they will make me feel welcome, but we can never completely

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surmount that language/cultural barrier to connect on a deeper level. I can’t help but feel that I’m stuck on the surface of this oceanic culture gasping for air while everyone around me has gills and fins. (November 2011, Asia)

Perhaps it is the lack of ability to assimilate that makes this time seem “unreal.” After seeking so much authenticity, attempting to capture every experience and absorb every moment, to find their “real” selves (Mathers, 2011), after trying to deep-level with locals, students find weights holding them down instead of wings lifting them up. They confront their own limitations. Perhaps recognizing their own boundaries is the lesson they have been meant to learn all along, as only from a place of knowing what binds and limits oneself can a true encounter occur. An encounter which acknowledges borders and begins to dismantle them.

ReviewofthetheoryIn the Theory chapter of the present study, Allport’s Contact Hypothesis, Buber’s book I-Thou, and various scholars’ critiques of study abroad were reviewed. I have already argued that the Bochner et al. 1977 study and Furnham and Alibhai’s 1985 study provide empirical evidence of both Allport and Buber’s writing. My current study provides a positive check on the original work of Bochner et al. The data demonstrates that most students who go abroad have more conational associates and friends than host national associates and friends. Students prefer their conational peers to host nationals for the majority of the activities tested.

In light of the legacy of lettered models in acculturation theory, I have decided to introduce you to my C-E-D model of interaction. I’ve adapted the Bochner et al. functional model of social networks to this one, which incorporates Buber, Allport, and other scholars as inspiration. There are three social networks a student belongs to: - C-Group: The goal of this network is to capture the experience. It is bound within time

and space and relies on external, ethnocentric validation. The means of achieving this goal is by conspicuous consumption and competency-focused growth. This network operates well within the student comfort zone. It is usually a monocultural network.

- E-Group: This network exists to enhance the extraordinariness of the study abroad experience. The people in this group enable students abroad through transactional and instrumental relationships that are fundamentally unequal. This network operates within what students perceive to be “extraordinary.” It is usually a host-cultural network.

- D-Group: This network is a manifestation of the modified “third culture” and has the goal of developing dialogue.31 The method of this is through discernment and diversity. It

31 “Dialogue is a conversation in which people think together in relationship. Thinking together implies that you no longer take your own position as final. You relax their grip on certainty and listen to the possibilities that result simply from being in a relationship with others--possibilities that might not otherwise have occurred” (Isaacs, 1999). While discussion is about making a decision, dialogue is about exploring the nature of choice. “What’s particularly interesting about Dialogue is that it is not just a way of making people feel connected. It has a generative power. Powerful new perspectives seem to spring unbidden from the simple act of suspending judgment and looking for points of contact in ideas that at first feel alien to us. And these perspectives often lead to tangible results – fresh ways of expressing ourselves, innovative projects, or novel modes of organizing” (Nilsson, 2007)

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operates within a dynamic society, where the lines between in-group and outgroup are blurred. It is a multicultural network.

This same information is presented in the table below, which also includes qualitative examples.

Goal: Capturing the experience, from within the comfort zone

Means: Conspicuous consumption, cross-cultural competency

C-Group

Status: Monocultural

I’ve met some wonderful people here, and I regret that our time together was so brief. But it’s great to think of all the amazing things we’ve done since August that we could not have imagined had we spent this semester at our home universities. I hope we all make it back to Europe in the future, and return to this great city that has served as our home for the past four months. I know I’ll be back- and hopefully I’ll still be able to give people directions.

(December 2011)

Goal: Enhance the experience

Means: Pursuit of extraordinary

E-Group

Status: Host cultural

But I have seen so much, from a street woman bringing rice to feed a cow in the morning and then dropping the paper bowl it came in on the street, to a huge solitary unnamed white elephant statue on a mountain of the Aravalli Ranges between Udaipur and Jodhpur. I saw people walking barefoot for 2 weeks to pay homage to an avataar of Ram’s (called “Rambaba”), and the same people pushing and elbowing in a crowd quite like a stampede to give darshan to Shreenatji in Nathdwara. I listened to a young woman tell me about how hard it was to enter the medical … and then heard the passion in her voice when she told me she was going to continue trying anyways because in her mind she couldn’t be anything else except for a gynecologist.

(August 2011)

Goal Dialogue, Diversity, Discernment

Means: Dialogue, Diversity, Discernment

D-Group

Status: Multicultural

She was my age, and when she said her favorite musician was Beyoncé I immediately knew we would get along splendidly. Her dad came and picked us up and then we got to her house and it was beautiful! We walked in the front door and her whole family was sitting in the big open room watching TV. And not just TV. THEY WERE WATCHING WHEEL OF FORTUNE. Again, shout out to my grandparents and my mom’s side of the family here, because Wheel of Fortune is practically a family tradition. That was a fate moment for me…When my family heard that I had had to go to the hospital, they came to visit me. The people at the reception desk asked them to make the visit quick if they were my friends, and they said, “No, we’re her family. We’re going in.” (my heart is swelling as we speak.) So they came and visited for a while...

(Fall 2011)

Table 21: C-E-D model

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Allport’s conditions for effective contact – cooperation, social sanction, equal group status, and common goals – do not exist within neither the first nor second group. The students are not challenged in their colonial, ethnocentric, and privileged position. Instead, they are validated in it. Therefore, when interacting within the first two networks, study abroad cannot be transformative. The first two networks are “functional” as Bochner et al. highlighted, but it is only with the removal of “function” altogether can a person be transformed and begin to have clarity of positioning, dismantle mental boundaries, and take action based in reciprocity. In addition, it is only with reciprocated power can a person be transformed, and thus be part of the transformation of another. Functional networks will lead to role-bound networks, within which “we [define] ourselves and each other in terms of the parts we play in the particularly narrow set of meanings through which the organization is framing the world” (Nilsson, 2007). Creating functional boundaries removes the “wholeness” of the individual. Allport’s four conditions for effective contact instead dwell within the third group, as do Pettigrew’s contact theory processes – learning about the outgroup, changing behavior, ingroup reappraisal, and generalization of outgroup learnings to extended outgroups. In the third group, process is in the outcome, the means are the end, and a reciprocal feedback loop is in place. It is a network that is inclusive of other networks and expands beyond its own boundaries. It is a network that is a “conversation with a center but no sides” (Isaacs, 1999). Nilsson explains: “[Isaacs] means that Dialogue doesn’t focus on bounding the conversation in order to achieve consensus. Instead, it creates a sense of shared meaning – a center – powerful enough to hold together any number of apparently diverse perspectives.” This sort of relationship could be found in study abroad if facilitated on country, program, and individual levels. In the first and second groups, the goals attempt to pin experiences down, put them in a mental museum, and bind them in a spatio-temporal context. Buber writes, “Every It borders on other Its; It is only by virtue of bordering on others… You has no borders” (55). By binding and containing experiences, we find only I-It experiences; by building and pursuing Dialogue – “thinking in relationship,” we develop the I-You relation. Nilsson elaborates: “Dialogue is one example of what we might think of as the geometry of the center, a geometry in which things are held together not because they are contained by borders or categories, but because they are all drawn to the same thing.” This statement reflects the true nature of the You-world. Schumacher places the same importance on the center in his book Small is Beautiful: “The center is constituted by our most basic convictions, by those ideas which really have the power to move us” (99). For Schumacher, the true meaning of education concentrates in the center, to which all intellectual subjects are connected. He considers education which fails to do this nothing more than training or indulgence. Education can help us only if it produces “whole people” who are increasingly able to order their disordered convictions. While this is a goal of study abroad, pursuing “experience” will not help students to embark on ordering their convictions. The focus should be on relation. Isaacs closes his book by suggesting that Metalogue is a state beyond Dialogue, where “meanings and structures mirror one another” (401). Where the process becomes the outcome and the ends become the means. He makes his final point, citing and echoing Martin Buber: “I enter a dialogue with myself, and as I do so, I enter into one with you as well… seized by an elemental togetherness, we touch the genuine power of dialogue, and magic enfolds” (403). This reminds me of Gandhi’s emphasis on the independence of the individual and system in terms of blame, but their mutual interdependence in terms of responsibility. In the context of study abroad and intercultural contact in general, this

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process is neither “facilitating” or “optimal” but instead vital.

AnalteredmodelfortransformationThe model I am describing is different from the traditional understanding of student transformation. In the mainstream model, students see themselves from the standpoint of their own comfort zones. As they go through the process of studying abroad, their comfort zones expand and often migrate towards what is understood as host cultural norms. This is seen as personal growth, but cannot be considered transformation. Their development is measured in terms of competencies and “global citizenship.”

Figure 13: Traditional model for student transformation

The diagram (Figure 14) is not a representation of the actual personal transformation but instead of self-perceived personal growth. In the model above, growth is demonstrated by a rigid, multifaceted comfort zone shifting linearly along a time continuum. The comfort zone is a center (the student’s needs and desires) with sides. Student ability is measured in terms of expansion, movement, and the maximization of self. However, in this model it is not demonstrated that students move beyond seeing themselves as the isolated “center.” The understanding of US culture and host culture is not augmented and they are seen as two separate worlds. The student sees himself or herself as connected, but only through their experience and not though a broader call to responsibility or action. Thus, the transformation indicators of increased clarity of positioning, the dismantling of mental boundaries, and action upon an understanding of mutuality and reciprocity are not present.

In another model, students become aware and increasingly free of their own comfort zones, and gain understanding that their home culture and host culture, both pluralistic, have systemic comfort zones. They understand how where they come from affects their experience as much as where they go to. As time goes on, the student begins to see the overlaps in these comfort zones, which look less like two independent regions and more like a Venn diagram, with the students located between home culture, host culture, shared culture, and neither culture.

Figure 14: Adapted model for student transformation

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Their transformation is measured in their ability to advocate for themselves and others, act through empathy, and see process as outcome. Again, the diagram below does not represent the actual transformation but instead the understanding of self.

At the beginning of their sojourn, their perceptions of home and host culture are fairly uncertain – which is why the US culture is not enclosed and the host culture is a partial curve of stereotypes and inherited knowledge of the outgroup. The student imagines their own comfort zone as rigid, and the fact that it touches the host culture comfort zone is the reason why they are part of the one-percent of individuals enrolled in institutions of higher learning that go abroad. As the student learns about themselves – reappraising the ingroup, for example – and about the host culture – by learning about the outgroup – they begin to see the overlap in systemic comfort zones of both their home and host country. They begin to see societal and individual interconnectedness. From this point on the diagram – labeled Comfort Zone 2 or “CZ 2”, the student is in a position for an I-thou relationship and a You-world time abroad. The student is in a contact zone with a porous and mobile comfort zone, prepared to authentically encounter another.

However, the Other is not present in either of these diagrams, which is their ultimate flaw. Though this model brings together student transformation from the point of view of Allport and Pettigrew, it fails to capture the importance of relationship. In order to truly meet Buber’s standards, the individual in this diagram must be personally interlinked with other members of their time abroad – creating a community. Transformation of one must involve transformation of another in order to be truly reciprocal. This sort of transformation can happen in community, in dialogue, and in a healthy third culture

VI.ConclusionThis paper has explored the relationship between study abroad, intercultural contact, and transformation. In this section, I will review my findings and discussion while providing implications for my research. I will close with a description of future directions of this research. I found through this research that American students abroad associate with conationals and over half have no host national friends. I tested 14 activities and found that students prefer American companions over host national companions for 10 of 14 of them. Most of these activities involved consumption, tourism, or both. The activities for which host nationals were preferred were ones of cultural engagement where local people served as gatekeepers. In this paper, I investigate which variables have a relationship to both friendship patterns and companionship preferences and I also theorize about alternative models for engagement and transformation. Ultimately, I conclude that students must go beyond seeing host nationals in transactional or instrumental roles and pursue deeper interpersonal engagement. According to Warren Nilsson, “One can’t create engagement, one can only release it. The question we need to ask ourselves is not ‘What should we do?’ but ‘What should we undo?’ The call is to discover what binds us” (57). In study abroad, students are bound by systems of consumerism and internalized privilege that need to be recognized and undone in order to build wholesome and reciprocal relationships. Building these relationships is both the process and the outcome of study abroad. I will explore visions for achieving this in the following sections.

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CounteringConsumerismIn his book The Value of Nothing (2010), Raj Patel says: “The opposite of consumption isn’t thrift—it is generosity” (29) Consumerism and study abroad are incompatible because the act of consumption is not reciprocated; students and host nationals are both bound in one-way transactional roles. Thrift, while limiting material expenditure, still measures success in terms of consumption. Generosity, on the other hand, relies on reciprocity. Scholars have suggested that study abroad programs should measure their impact not in terms of quantity of students enrolled, number of programs, or international breadth, but instead in terms of providing the “right” services to the “right” students in the “right” places. Determining the “right” who, what, and how is challenging (ask a Buddhist). Rather than writing a whole new chapter on this topic, I give a hint at my opinion by citing Raj Patel: “The real value of something is not its ability to satisfy a craving, a desire, a vanity, but to meet the need for well-being” (p. 174). I suggest programs seeking value follow this measure when focusing on student impact. In addition, the program-level impact spans beyond the students to the local community itself. If one is acting under the assumption that process is outcome, if a program is trying to transform minds, values, and society, the program organization itself must be on the edge of its comfort zone, seeking I-Thou relationships simultaneously with both students and the local community. Through this process, the lines between “local” and “foreign” and between “consumer” and “producer” will be blurred, and consumerism will no longer be a tolerable vehicle for cross-cultural interaction.

TransformingtheTouristGazeThe tourist gaze is incompatible with the goals of study abroad as it ultimately invalidates the Buberian value of process. While under consumerism, host nationals are means to means to ends (those who complete a transaction to provide a good or service to a certain end), for the person operating with a tourist gaze, the locals themselves become a means to an end. Students-as-tourists expect the input of an authentic, cross-cultural, and culture-shocking experience to result in the output of personal growth, global citizenship, and respect from friends and family, ultimately limiting their cross-cultural interactions. In order to counteract this focus on outcome over process, study abroad programs must dust off the traditional wisdom for how travel and learning can be done. One example is pilgrimage, which Ranchor Prime, author of Vedic Ecology, describes as “the environmental alternative to tourism.” He describes the rural Indian tradition of building a communal guest house which offers a free stay and meal to those who are passing through. This guest house is built under the assumption that in everyone’s life, at one point they are a pilgrim, and hospitality will be reciprocated. Another assumption is that money should not be the currency of a relationship and thus divide the deserving from the undeserving. Finally, every stop on the way is a part of the destination, and should therefore be meaningful. This tradition embodies three of Martin Buber’s principal values: reciprocity, process, and wholeness. Pilgrimage has an end goal in mind, but unlike tourism, acknowledges that the process of reaching there will take time, be difficult, and require truly authentic and reciprocal encounters. Within the context of study abroad, several variables can affect the context within which intercultural contact occurs, and these observations can be incorporated on an institutional level to counteract the tourist gaze. My empirical data shows that students enrolled in highly integrative programs (ones that include direct-enrollment, a host family placement, an NGO internship, or community volunteering, for example) have higher association and friendship rates

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with host nationals. Additionally, students who are learning a host language (rather than speaking their native language) have more quantity and better quality of host national contact. Finally, students who are in host countries that have less accessibility – students are ethnic minorities, have to speak a language other than English, and engage with a non-Western culture – have above average association and friendship rates with host nationals. Of course, the possibility of error exists due a skewed sample, reverse causality, and student self-selection into programs and host countries. However, both my theoretical and empirical analysis supports the trend that students on integrative programs and in host countries further from their comfort zone will have positive contact effects such as increased friendship with host nationals.

DevelopingahealthythirdcultureCitron (2002) describes the origin of the third culture as the following: “When confronted by different cultural practices, instead of adjusting by struggling to understand them, students chose to adjust by simply disregarding them and forming a third culture of their peers” (p. 51). The third culture is neither typical of the host country nor the home country; instead it is a fusion of both cultures as well as the culture of pop global nomadism and ideals of global citizenship. Because in Citron’s description the American students create an ingroup-only third culture, their cultural hegemony means that “instead of adjusting by struggling to understand [different cultural practices],” the students reject them. However, if the third culture were a multicultural network built on Allport’s four conditions, especially equal group status within the situation, the third culture would serve as an oasis on the edge of the comfort zone. A multicultural third culture would include American students abroad, local students who have travelled, and other nationals with a similar experience. Through this network, students will be able to access local social networks of host nationals as a true “friend of a friend” rather than a consumer or tourist. In a healthy third cultural environment that has both home and host country members, students would share their experiences through authentic relationships and be placed in a position of dual vulnerability and power. Creating this network would allow students to transcend the first model of transformation in the Discussion chapter and attain the second, wherein they see the architecture of home and host cultural comfort zones and participate in dialogue. They become increasingly aware of systemic comfort zones and decreasingly limited by their own. The boundaries become visible, which is the first step to dismantling them. In addition, including diversity of student backgrounds in the peer cohort itself through affirmative action would improve the issue of homogeneity in student programs as well as counteract the “luxury” status of study abroad. Students will also have the “single story” of their ingroup broadened: I remember a class in India where I made a broad statement about how religion is not as influential in US as compared to India, only to have a student from Alabama tell me that I was wrong and that in Alabama religion is incredibly important. She told the class that as a child she learned the Lord’s Prayer not from church but from softball practice, and the majority group of Northerners were left bewildered. From this moment, I was careful about what “facts” about the US I put forward, especially when talking to members of the host culture. Study abroad is an opportunity to meet people from the US that you would never encounter otherwise, and through shared experiences abroad these bonds can become strong. Diversity in the peer cohort is another way to strengthen the third culture and promote multifaceted dialogue.

Goingglobalvs.localMany of positive contact effects do not require an international sojourn. Just as students can learn from Americans in their peer cohort, students can be outside of their comfort zone on their

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own campus, perhaps with even greater impact. In the present study, the host country location was only important for companionship preference for two activities; thus, individual and program-level characteristics are more important. In order to connect personal transformation with broader social transformation, students need to understand their time abroad as it applies to their ends and means at home. My point is not that local engagement can trump global engagement, but that they are complementary and strengthen each other. Developing local engagement or domestic off-campus studies programs will open up access to off-campus learning to students who cannot afford to go abroad. All four of Pettigrew’s processes for positive cross-group contact will be catalyzed through local engagement just as much as global engagement: learning about the outgroup, behavioral change, ingroup reappraisal, and outgroup generalization. If the goal of study abroad is to blur the lines of “Us” and “Them” and develop I-Thou relationships rather than I-It experiences, there is no reason why students could not engage at home. Making sure that these programs put students outside of their comfort zone and are highly integrated into the community will result in positive contact effects, regardless of location.

RevisitingTransformationThis study relates to greater questions of international and intercultural relations, humanitarianism, and global interdependence. Though study abroad is a niche product, it is one that is accessed by individuals in a position to live “lives of consequence” (Reilly & Senders, 2009). Understanding how individuals nearing their professional lives process acculturation and negotiation of difference while confronting ethnocentrism and internalized privilege can enable the field to develop “pedagogical arts of the contact zone” (Pratt, 1991). These challenges will exist in all political, economic, and cultural contexts and techniques for working through them will serve others beyond just those involved in study abroad. Other directions for this research could include a sample of local people who encounter a mobile community from another culture (such as a local community with a foreign study abroad program or a town with rapidly increasing immigration), a community which undergoes changes when a large portion leaves and then returns again, or a community besides American educational sojourners who go abroad and engage in a community (such as aid workers or expatriates). A longitudinal survey of a multicultural community would also provide more information about the construction of a healthy third culture. Finally, research on the relationship between individual and structural transformation could provide insight into how a single person can effectively catalyze larger social change. In the introduction, I listed three aspects of transformation: increased clarity of positioning, dismantled mental boundaries, and action upon an understanding of mutuality and reciprocity. I argued that friendship is a powerful nexus of these three aspects and that friendship with host nationals will indicate student transformation in study abroad. My results have demonstrated that nearly half of American students abroad fail to make friendships with local people from their study abroad destinations. Students in highly accessible countries such as the UK and Australia have below average friendship with host nationals, perhaps because as they are not perceived as foreigners they do not get hospitality they would otherwise receive. Students who live, work, and study with locals have much higher rates of friendship, demonstrating that program-sponsored community integration is effective. This places a high level of responsibility on the program administrators and staff to ensure that the proper conditions for contact exist and students are supported throughout the processes of intercultural contact. Finally, individual aspects have been measured but not fully accounted for in this study. Individual characteristics are difficult to

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capture as they influence host country destination and program type through self-selection. However, on the whole, students who put “we” before “me” and who study languages have higher rates of friendship with local people. Selecting students who go abroad who demonstrate these characteristics and preparing those who do not through orientation will prove valuable. Challenging students directly to step outside of consumer and tourist roles, removing the rhetoric of consumption and tourism from international education marketing, and reframing the international sojourn in the frame of Critical Study Abroad will impact students’ expectations upon enrollment and approach to contact upon arrival. Finally and most importantly, the scope of accountability needs to be extended beyond student impacts to include local community impacts, putting people before profit. This will benefit all stakeholders, from students to staff to people in the community. Strong institutional relationships will lead to strong personal relationships which will in turn strengthen institutional relationships. In order to truly transform students, the industry of study abroad must be ready to operate on the edge of its own comfort zone and engage in authentic encounter as part of a local ecosystem.

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Urry, J. (1992). The tourist gaze "revisited". American Behavioral Scientist , 172-186. Urry, J. (1990). The tourist gaze. London: Sage. Urry, J. (2002). The Tourist Gaze: Lesiure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (2nd Edition

ed.). London: SAGE. Valencia, L. (2011). Foreign students and NGO volunteers in Rajasthan: Friendship patterns and

cultural preferences for companionship. Directed Thesis, University of Minnesota Studies in International Development, Jaipur, Rajasthan (India).

Ward, C., Bochner, S., & Furnham, A. (2001). The pscyhology of culture shock. London, UK: Routledge.

Ward, C., Leong, C.-H., & Low, M. (2004). Personality and sojourner adjustment: An exploration of the Big Five and the cultural fit proposition. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology , 35, 135-151.

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Wilkes, C. D. (2008). The student gaze. Retrieved from All CAS Faculty Scholarship: http://commons.pacific.edu/casfac/10

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AppendixA:QuantitativeData This appendix includes all of the relevant data analysis from Stata.

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Crosstabs: Host Country Accessibility / Association Rates & Friendship Rates HCRC = host country accessibility

Low = not accessible Full = fully accessible (English is a national language, the population is mostly White, and the culture is Western)

Aratehost = % of people listed on a list of “Who are the people you spend the most time with? List up to 5.” were host nationals Fratehost = % of people listed on a list of “Who are your five closest friends? List up to 5.” were host nationals ArateUS = % of people listed on a list of “Who are the people you spend the most time with? List up to 5.” were Americans FrateUS = % of people listed on a list of “Who are your five closest friends? List up to 5.” were Americans A score of “0” means 0% of their friends were American or host national; A score of “1” means 100% of their friends were American or host

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national. Crosstabs: Program-level Integration / Association Rates & Friendship Rates Progrc = Program-level integration in the community None = Respondent’s program did not integrate them into the community at all High = Respondent’s program integrated them in the community through direct-enrollment, living in a host family, or a community work placement Aratehost = % of people listed on a list of “Who are the people you spend the most time with? List up to 5.” were host nationals Fratehost = % of people listed on a list of “Who are your five closest friends? List up to 5.” were host nationals ArateUS = % of people listed on a list of “Who are the people you spend the most time with? List up to 5.” were Americans FrateUS = % of people listed on a list of “Who are your five closest friends? List up to 5.” were Americans A score of “0” means 0% of their friends were American or host national; A score of “1” means 100% of their friends were American or host

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national. Table of Means: hcrc = host country accessibility Progrc = program-level integration Sex = male or female Lang = self-assessed language abilities Arate = % of people listed on a list of “Who are the people you spend the most time with? List up to 5.” were host nationals, Americans, or other nationals Frate = % of people listed on a list of “Who are your five closest friends? List up to 5.” were host nationals, Americans, or other nationals

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Futplanrc = The relevancy of the respondent’s future plans to studying abroad Prevex = If a student had family members or friends from the host country prior to departure Libarts = If a student’s home institution is liberal arts Rgrowth = If one of the student’s reasons for going abroad was personal growth Rrelate = If one of the student’s reasons for going abroad was to build relationships with people different from his or herself

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CompanionshipPreferences

Crosstabs with Chi-squared significance Each of these crosstabs shows the relationship between companionship preferences for a particular activity with another variable. Fraterc (Friendship Rate with Americans; 0=none; 5=all)

- Df= 10 - Critical Region = 18.307

Crestn= Eating at a restaurant Cben = Just being Ccultn = Sightseeing or attending a cultural event Cmealn= Eating a home-cooked meal Crestn = Eating at a restaurant Cfestn = Celebrating a local festival Cshopn = Going shopping Csuppn = Getting personal support Cpartyn = Partying Cacadn = Getting academic help Chiken = Playing sports / hiking Cdoctn = Going to the doctor Clangn = Getting language help Cdaten = Dating

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Araterc (Association Rate with Americans; 0=none; 5=all)

- Df= 10 - Critical Region = 18.307

Crestn= Eating at a restaurant Cben = Just being Ccultn = Sightseeing or attending a cultural event Cmealn= Eating a home-cooked meal Crestn = Eating at a restaurant Cfestn = Celebrating a local festival Cshopn = Going shopping Csuppn = Getting personal support Cpartyn = Partying Cacadn = Getting academic help Chiken = Playing sports / hiking Cdoctn = Going to the doctor Clangn = Getting language help Cdaten = Dating

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Futplanrc (relevancy of future plans to study abroad)

- Df= 8 - Critical Region = 15.507

Crestn= Eating at a restaurant Cben = Just being Ccultn = Sightseeing or attending a cultural event Cmealn= Eating a home-cooked meal Crestn = Eating at a restaurant Cfestn = Celebrating a local festival Cshopn = Going shopping Csuppn = Getting personal support Cpartyn = Partying Cacadn = Getting academic help Chiken = Playing sports / hiking Cdoctn = Going to the doctor Clangn = Getting language help Cdaten = Dating

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Futplanrc – the relevancy of a study abroad to a student’s future plans

- Df= 8 - Critical Region= 15.507

Lang - self-described language proficiency)

- Df= 12 - Critical Region = 21.026

Crestn= Eating at a restaurant Cben = Just being Ccultn = Sightseeing or attending a cultural event Cmealn= Eating a home-cooked meal Crestn = Eating at a restaurant Cfestn = Celebrating a local festival Cshopn = Going shopping Csuppn = Getting personal support Cpartyn = Partying Cacadn = Getting academic help Chiken = Playing sports / hiking Cdoctn = Going to the doctor Clangn = Getting language help Cdaten = Dating

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Progrc (Program-level integration into community [e.g. host family, direct-enrollment] )

- Df= 6 - Critical Region = 12.592

Hcrc – Host country accessibility

- Df= 6 - Critical region = 12.592

Sex – Male or female

- Df =2 - Critical region = 5.991

Crestn= Eating at a restaurant Cben = Just being Ccultn = Sightseeing or attending a cultural event Cmealn= Eating a home-cooked meal Crestn = Eating at a restaurant Cfestn = Celebrating a local festival Cshopn = Going shopping Csuppn = Getting personal support Cpartyn = Partying Cacadn = Getting academic help Chiken = Playing sports / hiking Cdoctn = Going to the doctor Clangn = Getting language help Cdaten = Dating

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ParticipationRates Lang (Language abilities)

- Df= 15 - Critical Reg. = 24.996

Hcrc (Host country access.)

- Df= 9 - Critical Reg. = 16.919

Crestn= Eating at a restaurant Cben = Just being Ccultn = Sightseeing or attending a cultural event Cmealn= Eating a home-cooked meal Crestn = Eating at a restaurant Cfestn = Celebrating a local festival Cshopn = Going shopping Csuppn = Getting personal support Cpartyn = Partying Cacadn = Getting academic help Chiken = Playing sports / hiking Cdoctn = Going to the doctor Clangn = Getting language help Cdaten = Dating

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hcrc (Host country accessibility)

- Df= 9 - Crit. Reg.= 16.919

prevex (Previous experience)

- Df= 3 - Crit. Reg. = 7.815

fraterc (Friendship rate with Americans)

- Df= 15 - Crit. Reg.= 24.996

araterc (Association rate with Americans)

- Df= 15 - Crit. Reg.= 24.996

progrc (Program-level integration)

- Df= 9 - Crit. Reg.= 16.919

libarts (Home university is liberal arts)

- Df= 3 - Crit. Reg. = 7.815

sex (male or female)

- Df= 3 - Crit. Reg. = 7.815

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AppendixB:QualitativeDataThis appendix includes relevant qualitative data which has been kept out of the main document in the interest of brevity. Junior Thesis Case Study “Shopping in India is a very aggressive activity and doing so with host nationals may expose clear differences in class and purchasing power and make the student feel unconfident in their ability to bargain or manage. One participant, in a personal interview, told me about how her Indian boyfriend told her that she is much too aggressive and rude to shopkeepers and auto rickshaw drivers. This threw her into emotional turmoil because she felt that in India she was unable to ‘survive’ doing basic activities. The transition from “surviving” to ‘thriving’ is a huge shift, and the marketplace is one of the hardest places to do it. Three months later, upon her departure, the same individual mentioned that one of her most memorable experiences living in India was going back to the store where she was grossly overcharged during her first week living in Jaipur. Upon her return, eight months later, she was not only able to get a good price, but bargain it down by five hundred more rupees. The inclusion of this memory, as a ‘victory’ or ‘success’ indicates the importance of mastering the marketplace in overall confidence as a foreigner living in India. Shopping for necessities or clothes may have an unpreference for Indian companions for this reason, as the companions may challenge the weak self-confidence the foreigner has in their abilities to survive, as seen by the participant and her boyfriend” (30). Blog Excerpts Transactional Relationships

We had a week of orientation activities including bargaining for traditional ceremonial clothing (“pakaian adat”), a 1 hour drop off to talk to people in nearby villages, and finding “strange purchases” at the Karangasem market. (September 2011, Pacific) Setting my flower-adorned lit diya (five rupees from a cute little girl) on the Ganga, which has so much religious and historic significance, was an amazing experience that made the trip to this famous city worth it. (October 2011, Asia)

So anyway, I was getting two bottles of wine and when I went up to the checkout guy he actually said "G'day!" to me, and then when I was done he was like, "Cheers!!" It pretty much made my day, I felt like such a retarded American. (July 2011, Oceania)

Celebrating a local festival

After church we went back to the house and had toonai, with lots of mysterious meats that I ate very little of, even though I felt bad because they were clearly a luxury. But the

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boys got to eat all of the meat that I didn’t have and they loved it so I figured that was better than me trying to eat it and then getting sick after. (Fall 2011, Pacific)

Relating to Tourism

“When I first asked the driver how he felt about the students he drove around (being a driver for [my program] I presume he drives around many), he almost naturally said they were all fine. Then when I insisted that wasn’t possible, he said none had actually ever talked to him as much as we had, and besides general good mornings and shukriyas, this was not much beyond the 5 minutes of conversation we had had so far. Then he told us how he wasn’t actually allowed inside the place we are staying at, and I recalled how last night the chefs told us that he would have to eat his meal outside per rules of the owner/management. When he became a little more comfortable with us, he told us that people in India don’t respect drivers at all. He said that no one in [the area], presumably referring to hotels and bed-and-breakfasts like ours, allows drivers to come inside.” (August 2011, Asia)

During my first few days in [my host country], I became really self-conscious about looking like a tourist. I guess such a persona interferes with my desire to assimilate, to become an honorary [local]…. [but] at this moment I decided, hey, he’s right; It’s okay to act like a tourist sometimes. It’s permissible to take pictures of stupid little things, even if you feel a little conspicuous doing so. After all, all of this will only seem new to me for a little while longer. Once the novelty wears off, I may fail to recognize what things I will want to remember later on. So I’m going to go ahead, stop to admire at every statue in town, shop around at those corner souvenir stores and spend way too much kroner on pastries. My future quasi-[local] self might think I’m a dork, but at least I’ll have the evidence to prove it. (September 2011, Western Europe) Exploring Europe is great, if you do it right. My favorite places I’ve been? Hands down [my host city] and [another city]. Why? Because those are the places I spent the most time in and had the greatest opportunity to be immersed in their respective histories and culture. As for most of the other places I traveled to, while they were all fascinating and conducive to having a good time, I felt conspicuously like a mere passerby. But now I know for the future how I don’t want to travel: spending a couple days in a tourist bubble may be fine for some, but it seems like a waste when you could be gaining something far more valuable from the experience. (December 2011, Western Europe)

At the same time, I am trying to remember that things are different here, they run on a different beat. I need to recognize this to enjoy life here; I can’t have a fun time if I get mad that things happen slower or upset that someone judged me because I was foreign. (August 2011, Asia)

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Clarity of Positioning

A particularly favorite cousin of mine gave me this advice when we stayed up talking late: I should simply write like I’ve been taught to in all of my journalism classes and practical experiences: like a reporter. I will write about the exchanges I have with people, the opinions they express and the issues they stem from. I have always said that before I write about my own thoughts on a topic, I would like to surround myself with enough intelligent sources so that I can listen carefully to diverse voices and then make the most accurate opinion for my own. I know that more important than what a foreigner thinks about a place is how a local feels about that place which is his home. (August 2011, Asia)

First I become angry at those who reduce my white American presence to what they can get from me. I lose my patience when confronted, spitting out ugly words at beggar children. Jao, jao, nahi, nahi. Go away, go away, no, no. Later, guilt. The shame of being an ugly rich white person. Too busy, too stingy to help a brown barefoot child who sleeps next to the small Wal Mart owned grocery store where I shell out 150 rupees for peanut butter because I’m sick of home cooked Indian food. I am so anxious for some goodness. Something tangibly real and productively good. To learn and to do and to get something besides confusion from this hot country. (September 2011, Asia) The blending of Samoan and American culture in Pago was something i had been looking forward to seeing, and it was sometimes surprising. After having been in Independent Samoa for so long, the little American luxuries like gatorade, water fountains and fast food restaurants were thrilling. At the same time, the people on Tutuila were visibly larger and more unhealthy than most of the people we’ve seen on Upolu and Savaii. (Winter 2011, Pacific)

The car ride was actually quite thought provoking and insightful. I felt like I got to see the “real” India when we would pass all these small villages where people still live in mud huts, completely cut off society and technology. (I say this as I was sitting comfortably in an A.C. car, but still…) This world is so freaking huge; people have spread to the remotest corners, just trying to getting by and live their lives. I’ve always heard, we are just a tiny part in this huge universe. But I actually felt that when I experienced this, and I only saw one part of India. I think this feeling keeps me in check, and it definitely makes me want to travel even more so that I can see all of the diversity it has to offer. (November 2011, Asia)

Blah, blah, blah, cultural sensitivity, new experiences, better person…I get it. I’m thankful for where I am, the people who have helped me along the path, and I feel as blessed as ever for my life situation right now.…But that still doesn’t put the Packers-Lions game on TV. (November 2011, North Africa)

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I am not Danish. When I first got here, I felt it was my goal to become as Danish as possible, to figure out how they do things here and to slip myself right into their world. It didn’t work out so well, for several reasons I will not get into here. At first, I was almost ashamed to stand out as the American in Copenhagen, to wear my bright colored clothing and admit that I can’t speak Danish. But the longer I’ve been here, the prouder I’ve become of my homeland. Maybe we get a bad rap sometimes, but I think having a group of smart young Americans acting as ambassadors in Copenhagen has put us in a positive light. And every European I’ve talked to who has visited the States only has positive things to say about their time there. It makes me immensely happy to get this sort of validation- real people with real experiences making real judgements. I think that’s what makes study abroad so valuable. (December 2011, Western Europe)

My lives on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were weird. And that’s okay, because I learned that life is a little weird, depending on how you view it. It is weird that some Americans only pray once a week, drink alcohol too much to voluntarily lose control, and drive when it is perfectly acceptable to walk. It’s also weird that Moroccans don’t eat potato peels, urinate in public, and believe that walking on tile floors with just socks on your feet will leave you susceptible to evil spirits. But that’s okay. We’re all the same people, fighting for the same basic tenets of life: happiness, security, love. We just play different games to achieve those goals. You can believe all of this from your couch, but until you get off your butt and dive into a different culture, you can’t really know it. (December 2011, North Africa)

Third Culture

Later last night, I was eating dinner with some fellow students and this topic of the Buddhist “god” came up again. It just so happened that there was a western man who had obviously taken up the Monastic lifestyle (he was wrapped in the iconic red robes of Tibetan Monks) sitting next to us. I politely asked him this loaded question regarding what the Buddhist version of “god” is, not exactly a normal dinner table topic. I was met with an answer that rung true in my heart. (February 2012)

“A Cultural Ethography”

Have you seen someone who walks around with confidence, wearing local clothes, and calling sabzi wallas “auntie”, but who is definitely a foreigner? Have you sat comfortably in a restaurant, enjoying a nice cup of tea and seen, out of the corner of your eye, another foreigner – sitting at a table with Indians, laughing at their jokes, calling “O Bhaiya!” to the waiter, and ordering in Hindi? Have you mentally gone through the list of possibilities: are they a tourist? are they visiting family? are they one of those hippie travel-the-world types? are they actually Indian… but white? Well let your mind take rest, because I have an answer for you: They are the Foreign Student cum NGO Intern (FSI) and they not only have a complex culture, but also a mission to save the world. Let’s start with the superficial qualities of the FSI. As for appearance, you can expect them to have seasonal dress. In Rajasthan this involves a shawl, a salwar suit, and

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possibly some Indian-style shoes. If they are of the “field work” variety they may have “practical shoes” (Chacos, Tevas, or Converse). Though upon first glance, it may appear to a fellow foreigner that they are wearing local clothing – self admittedly to “blend in with the locals” – however, it will become increasingly evident that they will retain bits and pieces of their Western selves, perhaps a brightly colored wallet, a bracelet, a pair of goofy socks, or even a hairstyle. Additionally, to a foreign eye, it may appear that they are pulling off the Indian look, but what Indian would ever wear that shawl with those bangles? The innate fashion sense among the Indian Mother-in-law types is just not there in the FSI community, though they certainly try. The output is a sort of hybrid fashion – neither Western nor Indian, though trying to be both. A great example of this are the Indian style pants that no Indian would wear (you know, the saggy crotch ones). The sense of style is unique in that neither an FSI nor a local person would ever wear these bold outfits in their local culture, but it seems to make sense anyway. Now lets talk about the way that FSIs interact with one another. They form an interesting community, as they are both drawn to each other and are in fierce competition. Here is a point-tracking system for a typical “First Contact” to see who has the brighter tailfeather. Question 0: So where are you from? This is just an opening question. Let’s make sure we’re not from the same university. Question 1: So how long have you been here? How long will you be here for? Is this your first time in India? 1 point for longer resident or person with overall most experience. This sets the tone for the rest of the conversation as this person will take over the questioning for the time being, using a mentor-type tone. Question 2: And where are you working? 1 point for the FSI working with the more deprived community (ie single moms with AIDS is more extreme than teaching English to young professionals). ½ point for the losing person if they can talk about a friend who worked with the winning same community in a more deprived location (ie in a war zone), thus one-upping their conversation partner. Question 3: So where are you living? 1 point to the person with the more extreme living condition. Bucket shower? Well everyone has one of those. Lots of servants? Not too much hardship, huh? At the NGO? Kind of lame. In a slum with a single mom with AIDS? Nice play. Mean host mother? Oh that takes the cake. Question 4: Do you speak any Hindi? If you are in the process, say you are picking some things up. If you studied it before, say you have a good grasp. If you are fluent, just bobble your head. The key to winning this point is to understate your Hindi abilities, and then casually drop in some Hindi later on – “oh sorry! I’ve been thinking in Hindi these days…” – or call out to someone nearby in Hindi. This is a show not tell question. The point winner will, in the future, order at restaurants, deal with rickshaw valas, and will be Chief Local Impresser.

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Question 5: So have you been able to travel around at all? CURVEBALL QUESTION! If you say “No, I just got here… but I’m planning on going to ____, have you been there?” lose one point for amateurness. If you say “I went for two weeks backpacking to the Northeast” and the other person did something less extreme, get one point. However, the best answer is: “Well, my friends in Sikkim invited me to come, but I’m just so busy with work that I don’t know if I’ll have the chance to get out there. Probably on my next time working in India.” Congratulations! You have just settled it: you have local friends, you are busy with your important work, and you’ll be coming back to India again. You are an expert FSI. This is just the start of the complex FSI-FSI relationship. Some other phrases you will likely hear thrown around are “Haven’t talked to another foreigner in days!” “During my last bout of the [local word for diarrhea]” “Off to field work!” “Man, being back in this city is luxurious after living in a village for [impressive amount of time]!” They will also know how to get to lots of places, be jovial with rickshaw valas, appear to eat street food, and have gads of obnoxious local men texting them (“I thought the taxi driver in Rishikesh was nice so I gave him my number – you know, just as friends – but it turns out he’s just like the rest of them!”). One easy way to tell a novice FSI from an expert is the casual name drop. Whether they are name dropping places they have visited, other extreme countries they have worked in (again Spain<Argentina<El Salvador) and quantities of time that they have spent abroad (starting at a young age), they will be able to add the information into the conversation in such a way that they never told you explicitly… but you feel like you always knew. Discussions on International Development are fascinating with FSIs, as they tend to throw around a good amount of personal experience (“Well when I was helping a start-up in [a very deprived community, weren’t they luck to have me?]”), smart local insight from their bosses or other locals, and quotes from Jeffery Sachs, William Easterly, and Amartya Sen. Knowing some country-specific thinkers is useful as well, as well as history. Secret weapon? Reading local newspapers. Nothing can beat a “Did you see yesterday’s Times of India?” FSIs are equally likely to praise their NGO (relative to other local NGOs) and condemn it (relative to NGOs from their home country). Expert FSIs are able to take the conversation to the next level in a matter of minutes with two tools of the trade: dropping in local words (how do you say bajra in English, again?) and dropping in powerful NGO jargon (yeah, but is that sustainable in the local context?). A good overriding tone for the conversation is casual indifference and stuffy realism. Enthusiasm is overrated and fades over time. FSIs are much friendlier with the local people than with the people of their own community as these are the people to give out compliments such as “you’re just like an Indian!” They are also surprisingly friendly to tourists (to their faces) as they will constantly be able to tout their language abilities, their length of time staying here, their knowledge of the area and ability to give directions.

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The most important thing to know, though, is that really, when it comes down to it, FSIs are good at heart. They are just suffering as a cultural orphan, trying to redefine themselves in their new foster culture. All FSIs sneak peanut butter sometimes. All FSIs are tricked by local tradesman. All FSIs grow bitter at their foster culture, glorify their home culture, and turn on themselves for having chosen this existence. Emotionally vulnerable and in constant survival mode, the FSI will feel easily threatened, but is also resilient. This resilience is what gives them the potential to help their NGO host, to learn about their new foster culture, and to take back home tales for the peanut gallery (I really liked India, but I think I want to go to Africa next…).

(March 2011)

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AppendixC:Survey Q1. Study Title: Study Abroad and Friendship Networks 1. This survey is about friendship patterns of students abroad. My name is Laura Valencia, I'm a senior at The College of Wooster, and this study is for my Senior Independent Study. 2. Please answer all questions honestly. 3. If you are a college student who spent Fall 2011 abroad or the 2011-2012 Academic year abroad, you are eligible to take this survey. You must be 18 years or older. 4. This study includes a survey which will take you about 20 minutes to take. 5. There are no risks or discomforts associated with this study for respondents. There are no direct benefits for respondents. 6. Your information will be labeled with a code number and will remain confidential. By checking the box below and completing the survey, you are indicating that you are 18 or older, have read and understand the above information, and that you consent to allow the information you have provided to be used in a research report. Thank you.* [ ] Agree [ ] Disagree Q2. Host country name If you were in multiple countries, please select the country you have spent the most time in or use the "Multiple Countries" option. If you were at Sea, please select the "Programs at Sea" option. [ There is a drop-down box with the list of all countries with study abroad programs ] Q3. What is your nationality? [ There is a drop-down box with a list of countries, with the United States of America at the top] Q4. What is the timeframe of your study abroad program? [ ] 1 semester (Fall 2011) [ ] 2 semesters (2011-2012) [ ] Other: ______________________________ Q7. Read the following reasons for going abroad. Which THREE did you most identify with? [ ] Academic purposes, intellectual pursuits [ ] Career goals, vocational exploration [ ] A new challenge, achievement [ ] To grow as a person, find personal meaning, and self-understanding [ ] To build relationships and meet people different from myself [ ] To experience an exotic, foreign place

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[ ] To learn and use a new language or skillset [ ] To explore and develop a new and different side of myself [ ] To engage and integrate with a new community Q8. While in your host country, which of these activities did you participate in regularly? [ ] Taking classes at a local university [ ] Taking classes with a study abroad program [ ] Taking language classes [ ] Volunteering (6-10 hours a week) [ ] Interning or working with a non-profit or community organization [ ] Interning or working for a company [ ] Group travel (formal, with program) [ ] Independent, informal travel (with friends, family, or alone) [ ] Research [ ] Other, please specify Q11. Do you have any family members from your host country? [ ] Yes [ ] No Q12. Before going abroad, did you have any close friends from your host country ? [ ] Yes [ ] No Q13. Will you follow a career in a field that requires cross-cultural interaction in the future? [ ] Very Unlikely [ ] Unlikely [ ] Somewhat Unlikely [ ] Undecided [ ] Somewhat Likely [ ] Likely [ ] Very Likely Q14. Will you live abroad long-term (for 5-10 years) in the future? [ ] Very Unlikely [ ] Unlikely [ ] Somewhat Unlikely [ ] Undecided [ ] Somewhat Likely [ ] Likely [ ] Very Likely Q15. Please rate your satisfaction with the following aspects of your study abroad experience. Overall experience 1 2 3 4 5 Academic experience 1 2 3 4 5

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Work experience 1 2 3 4 5 Social life 1 2 3 4 5 Language acquisition 1 2 3 4 5 Relationship with housemates 1 2 3 4 5 Relationships with coworkers 1 2 3 4 5 Comfort in public 1 2 3 4 5 Meaningful cross-cultural interaction 1 2 3 4 5 Personal mobility, ease of daily tasks 1 2 3 4 5 Q16. What is your language proficiency in your host country's language? [ ] Beginner - I can greet people and that's it! [ ] Advanced Beginner - I can be polite to strangers [ ] Intermediate - I can participate in friendly conversation and hold my own while bargaining [ ] Advanced - I can express my thoughts and opinions clearly in meaningful conversation [ ] Fluent - I can write academic papers and give presentations to an audience [ ] Native speaker - This is my native language. Q17. Think of all of the people you know in your host country, and identify up to five people you spend the most time with on a daily basis. If you have moved locations, you may use individuals from your first location. Fill in the table below with their characteristics. Put the person's Initials or Nickname in the blank space under the "Person #X" label. You will not have to reenter their details later in the survey. It will remain confidential.

Q18. Now think of the five people in your host country who would qualify as your closest friends. Please fill in the table below.

Characteristics of Individual Person 1 Person 2 Person 3 Person 4 Person 5 Sex Age Nationality

American From my host country From another country

Our relationship We live together

We study together We work together

We socialize together They are my mentor/boss

Other

Nickname

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These can be the same individuals as above, or different. If you have also listed them above, please select their nickname below. If previously unlisted, put the person's Initials or Nickname in the blank space under the "Friend #X" label.

Q19. People engage in different activities with a variety of individuals every day and choose different persons to be their companions depending on what the activity is. Below is a checklist of some situations and activities. Who would you prefer as your companion for each of these situations and activities? Think of an actual person, then write his or her sex, age, nationality, and your relationship in the appropriate box. If you would prefer to be alone or not engage in the activity, please note this. If you would prefer not to respond, leave blank. Situation and/or Activity Gender Age Nationality Relationship Other

Going out to eat at a

restaurant

Partying on the weekend

Shopping

Sightseeing/ Attending a

cultural event

Eating a home-cooked meal

Characteristics of Individual Person 1 Person 2 Person 3 Person 4 Person 5 Sex Age Nationality

American From my host country From another country

Our relationship We live together

We study together We work together

We socialize together They are my mentor/boss

Other

I listed this person on the previous table (Write nickname)

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Hiking or sports

Getting language help

Getting academic help

Support for personal or

emotional problems

Going to a doctor

Celebrating a local festival

Dating

Just talking

Just being

Note: For Nationality and Relationship, drop down boxes provided the options from the previous questions. Other included “No Preference, Alone, Do not participate” Q21. Thank you for participating in this survey. Please fill in the optional demographic data. Age: _______ Q22. Sex: [ ] Male [ ] Female Q23. Program name: (i.e. SIT Ecuador: Social Change and Development) _______________________________________________________________ Q24. Field of study

o Agriculture o Anthropology o Archaeology o Architecture and Design o Area studies o Business o Chemistry o Computer sciences o Cultural and ethnic studies o Divinity o Earth sciences o Economics

o Education o Engineering o Environmental studies and Forestry o Family and consumer science o Gender and sexuality studies o Geography o Health science o History o Human physical performance and

recreation o Journalism, media studies and

communication

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o Law o Library and museum studies o Life sciences o Linguistics o Literature o Logic o Mathematics o Military sciences o Performing arts o Philosophy o Physics o Political science

o Psychology o Public administration o Religion o Social work o Sociology o Space science o Statistics o Systems science o Transportation o Visual arts o Other

Q25. Home university: (i.e. University of Minnesota) _____________________________________________ Q26. Graduation year _______ Q27. If you have a blog and would like to share it with the researcher, please include the web address below. It will remain completely confidential. This extra information about your study abroad experience will be highly appreciated. _______ We thank you for your time spent taking this survey. Your response has been recorded.