Constructing home and identity across cultures: The culture shock and return culture shock experience of international students.

摘要

This is an exploratory study of culture shock and return culture shock. When sojourners venture into a culture different from their own, they may experience culture shock. As they interact in their host culture, they adapt to the normative values and social expectations of this new environment and construct a social identity more compatible with it.;After months abroad, sojourners return to their country of origin thinking they would be returning 'home'. When they find 'home' strange and no longer the way that they remembered it they experience return culture shock. They have to be re-socialized into their country of origin and this process of re-socialization to their 'home' culture leaves returnees with a feeling of non-belonging that threatens their sense of self as members of a culture in which they were born and raised. As such, I argue that return culture shock is more debilitating than culture shock.