Intercultural relationship development at university: A systematic literature review from an ecological and person-in-context perspective

Publication date: Available online 27 January 2017 Source:Educational Research Review Author(s): Kazuhiro Kudo, Simone Volet, Craig Whitsed For more than four decades, issues pertaining to the development of intercultural relationships between international and domestic students in university settings have received scholarly attention. However, there appears to be lack of research exploring the extent to, and the manner in which the individual and environmental dimensions interact with one another to co-create this development. This review addresses this gap by scrutinising English-language refereed journal articles from an ecological and person-in-context perspective. The review, involving a constructionist thematic analysis of systematically searched and screened papers, identified the few empirical studies from that perspective, the vague operationalisation of intercultural relationship development, and the methodological limitations of the empirical work. It also generated content-related themes of the individual–environmental interactions in the development of intercultural relationships. The review concludes by suggesting multiple areas of inquiry that warrant further empirical investigations, and by calling for the amplification and refinement of the research methodologies.

Source: Educational Research Review - January 27, 2017 Category: Child Development Source Type: research