The document discusses stress, coping, and adjustment frameworks for understanding intercultural contact and transition. It outlines factors that influence stress and adjustment, including life changes, social support, personality, knowledge and skills, modes of acculturation, demographics, cultural distance, and experiences of prejudice and discrimination in the host culture. Psychological adjustment is viewed as occurring over time and involving cognitive appraisal of stressors and implementation of coping strategies.

1. Stress, Coping and Adjustment
•Affective components of intercultural
contact
•Psychosocial rather than medical
models
•In contrast to psychopathology, current
approaches discuss intercultural
contact and change in terms of dealing
with stress

2. The Stress & Coping Framework
Highlights life changes during
cross-cultural transition, the
appraisal of these changes, and
the selection and implementation
of coping strategies to deal with
them

3. Core Assumptions
• Experience of intercultural contact and
change occurs in an economic &
sociopolitical context and is influenced
by both societies (origin & settlement)
• Changes are seen as precipitating stress
that result in affective, behavioral and
cognitive coping responses

4. Berry’s Framework (pg. 72, Ward)
•Acculturative experience is major life
event characterized by stress that
demands cognitive appraisal of the
situation and requires coping strategies
•Processes and psychological outcomes
are influenced by both societal and
individual level variables

5. Societal Level Variables
•Social, political and
demographic factors
•Berry also distinguishes
between variables prior to
and during acculturation.

6. Factors affecting Stress, Coping
and Adjustment
•Life changes: series of stress
provoking life changes that tax
adjustive resources and necessitate
coping strategies
•Social Readjustment Rating Scale
(SRRS): a functional index of life
changes
•Cultural Readjustment Rating Scale

7. Appraisal and Coping Styles
•potential stressors may be seen as
challenging or threatening.
•Appraisals influenced by individual,
cultural, situational and social
factors
•Appraisals and coping strategies
vary due to differences in
expectations

8. Expectations
•Overmet: situations in which
experiences are more positive than
expected
•Undermet: situations in which
experiences are more negative than
expected
•Coping styles are related to coping
satisfaction

9. Psychological Adjustment
Over Time
•U-curve
•Stress & Coping literature: in contrast
to ‘entry euphoria,’ sojourners and
immigrants suffer the most severe
adjustment problems at the initial
stages of transition when the number
of life changes is highest and coping
resources lowest

10. Personality
• Authoritarianism, rigidity and ethnocentrism
• Extraversion and sensitivity or ‘universal
communicator’
• Extensive theorizing but few documented
investigations of how personality affects
adjustment
• ‘cultural fit’ hypothesis

11. Social Support
•Predicts both psychological
adjustment and physical health
•Family, Friends, Acquaintances
•Marital satisfaction-dissatisfaction
and adaptive-maladaptive coping
may be associated in many ways

12. Friends & Acquaintances
•Co-national vs. host national
support
•‘Comparable Others’ are those
undergoing similar experiences who
may offer knowledge or information
about coping
•‘Sinking Ship Morale’

13. Relationships with host nationals
• Having host nationals as friends is associated
with a decrease in psychological problems in
immigrants
• Comfort and satisfaction with local contact
is associated with greater general life
satisfaction in foreign students
• Prerequisite for sojourner adjustment and
learning cultural-specific skills

14. Social Support Scale for Sojourners
•Highlights the availability of social
support and asks respondents to
indicate if there are persons who
would offer a variety of supportive
behaviors
-see page 89, Ward

15. Knowledge & Skills
•Provide the foundation for effective
intercultural interaction
•Facilitate psychological adaptation
to new sociocultural environments
(prior experience, training and
educational programs)

16. Knowledge & Skills
•Adequate communication may be the
key component to intercultural
effectiveness
•Inverse relationship also observed
•Social skills very significant for
adjustment

17. Modes of Acculturation
•Acculturation is related to both
more and less stress and
depression.
•Research supports ‘integration’
over ‘assimilation’

18. Acculturation of groups
•Berry compared level of acculturative
stress in groups within a multicultural
society; native peoples and refugees
experienced highest levels of
acculturative stress; immigrants and
ethnic groups, the lowest level;
sojourners intermediate.

19. Demographic factors
•Stress and coping research is mixed
and ambiguous on gender
differences, age and adaptation
across generations.
(page 94, Ward)

20. Cultural Distance
•Link between cultural distance
and psychological disturbance
•Greater cultural distance is
associated with increased
intensity of life changes during
transition and more
acculturative stress

21. Prejudice and Discrimination
• A number of researchers speculate that
attitudes held by members of the
dominate culture strongly influence
patterns of immigrant, sojourner and
refugee adaptation.
• Racism is the most serious risk factor for
immigrants
• ‘Perceived discrimination’ also a factor