Cultural novelty and international students’ experience: a five-country study

Research has linked cultural differences between a sojourner’s home and host country with their cultural transformation. Nonetheless, the results of empirical studies are inconclu-sive due to different operationalizations of cultural differences and testing among differ-ent groups of sojourners. We extend previous investigations by examining the effects of cultural novelty (i.e., the subjective perception of cultural differences) on the experience of international students (N = 1114) in Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the USA. Drawing on acculturation and social learning theories, we conceptualized a model of stu-dents’ adjustment and satisfaction taking into account cultural novelty. We tested the model through multi-group structural equation modeling (SEM) and examined the various rela-tionships across subsamples from all five countries. We determined the significant effects of cultural novelty and a range of factors impacting students’ intercultural experience, such as their cultural intelligence, cultural background, second-language skills, time in the host country, and socialization with domestic students, and how the effects may vary by the host country. We discuss implications for future research and practice.