Social skills acquisition: A closer look at foreign students on college campuses and factors influencing their level of social difficulty in social situations

This study investigated the level of difficulty foreign students encountered in social situations when in a host culture. The roles of age, academic classification, cultural similarity, and network patterns on the level of social difficulty were investigated. Results indicated that graduate and undergraduate foreign students differed in the degree of social difficulty they experienced in host cultures. However, the two groups did not differ in their network composition of host people classified as best friend (i.e., intimate relationships). Some support was found for hypothesized relationships between masculinity-femininity and power distance dimensions of cultural similarity and social difficulty. The nature of the relationship indicated that when foreign students are from cultures that are similar to the host culture, they experience lower levels of social difficulty. This effect was not true for the other two dimensions (i.e., individualistic-collectivistic and uncertainty avoidance).