بررسی بیشتر نقشی که انگیزش برای تحصیل در خارج از کشور بازی می کند، در اقتباس از دانشجویان بین المللی در کانادا

We investigated the role self-determined motivation and the goals international students have for studying abroad play in the adaptation of international students. We studied samples of international students from three Canadian Universities at the beginning of an academic year (N = 228) and at the end of the same year (N = 72). The results supported the hypotheses that autonomous motivation to study abroad is a predictor of students’ various adjustment outcomes at different times of the academic year and that the preservation goals have a weaker negative effect upon the adjustment outcomes and this effect is relatively independent from the effect of autonomy. These results are consistent with the previous study of Chinese international students in Belgium and Canada [Chirkov, V.I., Vansteenkiste, M., Tao, R., & Lynch, M. (2006). The role of motivation to study abroad in the adaptation of international students: A self-determination theory approach. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 31(2), 199–222]. The role that gender, marital status and country of origin play in moderating these relations is also studied and discussed. The main conclusion further justifies the importance of motivation in understanding the adjustment dynamics of various groups of migrants.

In a recent study, Chirkov, Vansteenkiste, Tao and Lynch (2007) argued that the motivation of international college students who go to a foreign country for studying is an important factor in predicting their adjustment. Using three samples of Chinese students in Belgium and Canada, they assessed the level of autonomous versus controlled motivation in making the decision to study abroad together with the importance of two groups of goals for studying abroad: preservation and self-development goals. The results of the study supported the hypotheses that level of autonomous motivation is a strong predictor of several adjustment outcomes across different samples and different countries of sojourn. They also discovered that preservation goals had the tendency to be negatively associated with some adjustment outcomes and had an effect on them independently of autonomous motivation. Based on these results, they concluded that the migration motivation of various groups of migrants including international students could be successfully studied using the two-factor model of human motivation proposed by the self-determination theory (SDT) of human motivation (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Sheldon, Ryan, Deci, & Kasser, 2004). This model is comprised of the level of autonomous versus controlled motivation and the content of goals that motivate people to move abroad. Chirkov et al. also mentioned that these conclusions should be verified on different samples of migrants and sojourners using various designs. In this article, we continue this direction of research on migration motivation and apply the two-factor model of migration motivation to multiethnic groups of international students from different Canadian universities. We have solid evidence to propose that the students who feel that they initiated their decision to study abroad and stood behind it will be happier, less distressed and more successful in adjusting to a new country in comparison to those who feel they were pressured by other people or circumstances to move abroad. The reason for this confidence comes not only from the empirical results of the above-mentioned study, but also from the intensive theoretical and empirical research on the role of autonomy and self-determination in people's functioning conducted by the self-determination theory researchers (Deci & Ryan, 1985, 2002; Ryan and Deci, 2000 and Ryan and Deci, 2004). According to the self-determination theory (SDT), striving for autonomy, the desire to be the master of one's behavior, is a fundamental need of every human being. As empirical research demonstrated, whatever activity people undertake, their success and their well-being while executing it strongly depends on their level of self-determination in choosing and performing it [see (Deci & Ryan, 2002)]. Researchers discovered with near universal regularity that people who are involved in activities because they either enjoy them and find them interesting or because they truly believe in the importance of the activities and strongly endorse them by identifying with their values and integrating them into their selves are more successful, happier and healthier than people who do not have this kind of motivation (Deci, Vallerand, Pelletier, & Ryan, 1991; Gagne & Deci, 2005; Ryan, Deci, Grolnick, & La Guardia, 2006; Sheldon, Williams, & Joiner, 2003). There is no reason to think that the decision to study abroad is in any aspect different from other activities that have been studied so far. The other aspect of human motivation that SDT researchers constantly emphasize is the content of the goals that people set for themselves in their daily lives. These researchers mainly study people's life-goals which are value-like, life-guiding principles (Kasser and Ryan, 1993 and Kasser and Ryan, 1996), whereas, Chirkov et al. (2007) addressed the goals of international students to move abroad as “more specific situational objectives that are shaped by their situation in the home country, relationships with families, future career goals and other conditions” (p. 205). These researchers discovered two groups of international students’ goals: preservation and self-development goals. This distinction corresponds closely with the traditional conceptualization of migration motivation, as suggested by economists and sociologists, which differentiates ‘push’ and ‘pull’ motives (Martin, 1993). Preservation goals include various strivings to avoid aversive situations in their home country in order to preserve their security, freedom and other humane conditions. Self-development goals incorporate strivings related to obtaining better education and establishing successful careers. Consequently, the motivation of each international student could be represented by a combination of the two types of goals that motivated them to study abroad together with the level of self-determination that they exercised during this decision. This model of migration motivation raises several questions: do the content of the goals and the level of autonomy that motivate international students have any relation with the success of their adjustment and functioning in a new country? Do these goals relate in any systematic way with a student's level of self-determination and are there any interactions between goals and autonomy in predicting adaptation outcomes? Although the above-mentioned study provided answers to some of these questions, more research is required to verify the discovered relations and to analyze them in more details. Specifically, Chirkov et al. discovered that the level of autonomy is a stronger predictor of adjustment than are preservation goals and that autonomy and the preservation goals are independent predictors of the academic motivation and well-being of Chinese students abroad.

The goal of this study was to further explore the role that self-determined motivation and the goals for studying abroad play in international students’ adjustment to life in Canada. Specifically, in the current study we wanted to replicate the results of the previous studies (Chirkov et al., 2007), where the level of students’ autonomy played a positive role in their adaptation, by utilizing ethnically heterogeneous samples of international students from three Canadian Universities from two provinces. We wanted to explore the interactions between the two factors of the motivation for studying abroad, the level of autonomy and the content of goals that students strive for, in predicting adaptation outcomes and the role demographic factors, such as gender, marital status and geographical regions, play in predicting outcome variables and in moderating the predictions of the motivational factors. Finally, we explored the role situational factors, such as social support, cultural competence and acculturation motivation, play in predicting students’ adjustment outcomes. The results supported our main assumption that the motivation for studying abroad should consider at least two factors: the level of autonomy in making this decision and the content of the goals that students pursue while moving abroad. These two factors not only accounted for the independent portion of the variance in some outcome variables, but they also interacted with each other in a complex way in predicting these variables. The results of this study confirmed our main hypotheses that the autonomous motivation for moving abroad to get an education is a powerful predictor of international students’ adjustment. With some variations, these results closely replicated the results of the previous study conducted on samples of Chinese students in Belgium and Canada (Chirkov et al., 2007). The current study also demonstrated that this positive effect of autonomous motivation is at least a semester-long lasting, as we discovered positive predictions of some outcome variables not only at Time 1 (the beginning of the academic year) but also at Time 2 (the second half of the same year). The same results also validated the short version of the SRQ-SA, which we utilized in this study. The results from these two studies indicated that when international students’ decisions to move to a foreign country to further their education is based on self-determined motivation, the chances of succeeding in a new setting become higher in comparison to students who were forced and/or controlled by others into making this decision to study abroad. The content of students’ motivation to study abroad was not a powerful predictor of adjustment outcomes compared to autonomy, neither with regard to the consistency and number of significant correlations with the outcome variables, nor with regard to the effect size of the regression coefficients. However, to answer the question regarding the relations of the two types of goals to the adaptation of international students, it will require more data. For now, we can conclude that there is a tendency for the preservation goals to be negatively related to some of the outcomes, whereas the self-development goals usually have either small or no relations with adaptation outcomes. Our results could be partly complemented by the results of the studies of Gong and his colleagues (Gong, 2003; Gong & Fan, 2006) on the role of goal orientation in the cross-cultural adjustment of international students. In a series of studies with international students these researchers assessed students’ dispositional goal orientations: learning/mastery goals versus performance goals. The learning/mastery goal orientation was characterized by a tendency for a person to master his or her environment and acquire new skills and knowledge, whereas the performance goal orientation was defined by a desire to demonstrate to others the adequacy of one's abilities and to avoid negative judgments from others. In a series of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies these researchers discovered that the learning orientation of international undergraduate students in the USA was consistently positively related to their academic and social adjustment, whereas the performance orientation demonstrated contradictory predictions with regard to academic adjustment (Gong, 2003) to no predictions at all and negative predictions of social self-efficacy (Gong & Fan, 2006). According to achievement motivation theorists, the learning/mastery orientation is usually related to intrinsic (autonomous) motivation (Harackiewich & Elliot, 1993; Rawsthorne & Elliot, 1999), whereas the performance orientation typically exhibits an undermining effect on intrinsic motivation. When acknowledging this, the above-mentioned results highlight even more; first, the important role motivational factors play in sojourners’ adjustment, and, second, the importance of self-determined motivation and mastery orientation for the students who come to a foreign country to further their education. It is also worth mentioning that in the study of sojourners partners, Copeland and Norell (2002) discovered that the women with a higher adjustment level were, among other factors, more involved in the decision to move abroad. This could mean that they personally stood behind this decision, felt more control over the decision and probably more autonomy in moving abroad. The interactions between these two motivational factors are also interesting to discuss. Based on our two studies, we may say that there is a somewhat stable tendency for autonomy and preservation goals to be two independent factors in predicting students’ adjustment outcomes. In the previous study (Chirkov et al., 2007), the preservation goals accounted for independent portions of the variance in the academic motivation and well-being index, and in this study, they accounted for the variance in psychosomatic symptoms. The limitation of this conclusion is that this independence is not consistent across all variables and that the main effects of the predictions by these goals were often marginal. The fact that the self-development goals did not demonstrate an effect on the outcome variables independently from the autonomy variable also limits the validity of our conclusion that the level of autonomy and the content of the goals are two independent motivational factors. This tendency probably exists for the preservation goals but not for the self-development ones. One possible reason why the self-development goals did not demonstrate this tendency is that, as our analysis of the role of the geographical regions in predicting outcomes demonstrated the predictions of the self-development goals varied considerably from region to region and, when we collapsed the participants from different regions together, we probably neutralized the effect of these goals. The conclusion is that in the future we must conduct analyses within each ethnic group accompanied by a careful control for the content of motivation. In this study we also discovered several interactions between the level of relative autonomy and the goals’ content. These interactions indicated that the goals, both preservation and self-development, reduced the positive predictions the level of autonomy had on the adjustment outcomes. Specifically, if the students rated the importance of their goals highly, the predictive power of autonomy with regard to positive adjustment became weaker. These relations are understandable for the preservation goals – the preservation/avoidance goals are predominantly accompanied by controlled motivation which negatively interacts with the autonomous forms of regulation – but they are difficult to explain with regard to the self-development goals: Why do they work against the autonomy and not together with it? This paradox needs to be explored further. In relation to our other research goals, we may report that the women demonstrated a higher level of relative autonomy than the men did in their motivation to study abroad. In the previous study (Chirkov et al., 2007) there were no gender differences with regard to this variable in all three samples. This higher level of relative autonomy in women is accompanied in our study by more psychosomatic symptoms in women in comparison to men. This fact that female international students have more somatic and mental health problems than their male counterparts is well-known (Church, 1982), but the causes of these problems and especially the relations between mental health and motivation among women should be studied more. We discovered that the marital status of students (living with a partner or married) relates positively to their adjustment, whereas the single students have more difficulties with their adjustment. The level of social support may play an important role here (Glennon & MacLachlan, 2000) as the partners of married (or co-living) students inevitably provide social support for them. As we also discovered, the direct measure of social support had strong correlations with several outcome measures. But being with a partner in a host county does not come without costs. For example, Chapdelaine and Alexich (2004) discovered the negative correlation between the family status of international students and the social interactions with host students. This means that the students with partners, wives and especially with families interact less with the students from the host country than do single students. But, as many researchers discovered (see Church, 1982 (Halualania, Chitgopekarb, Thi, Morrisonc, & Dodge, 2004; Lee, Koeske, & Sales, 2004)), interactions with host nationals is one of the most important factors in the successful long-term adjustment of international students. The ethnicity of the partner may also play a role in students’ adjustment. Specifically, Buddington (2002) reported that the Jamaican college students living in the US with non-Jamaican partners experienced more stress than the students living with partners from Jamaica, suggesting that cultural differences between partners may be an additional source of problems and complications for international students. The nationality of students is also an important factor to consider when analyzing international students’ motivation to study abroad and their overall adjustment. Thus, the East Asians could be characterized by a high level of introjected motivation for moving abroad, when the expectations of others and the desire ‘not to lose one's face’ are the predominant motivations for making the decision to study abroad. Conversely, the Westerners (Europeans, North Americans and Australians) demonstrated low levels of self-development goals so their move to Canada was probably determined by other reasons, such as the less expensive cost of education in Canada, having a Canadian boyfriend/girlfriend, and other family and life circumstances. Another logical result is that the Western students experience fewer difficulties in adjusting to life in Canada in comparison to non-Western students. The same results obtained by other researchers (Furnham & Bochner, 1982; Ward, Bocher, & Furnham, 2001; Ward & Searle, 1991) (Chirkov, Lynch, & Niwa, 2005; Searle & Ward, 1990) gave raise to a so called ‘cultural distance hypothesis’, which states that students from the countries that are culturally close/similar to the host country experience less stress and difficulties in adjusting in comparison to students from the culturally distant countries. Completely in line with this explanation, the East Asians students in our study had a lower well-being and the students from Africa reported more social difficulties than Westerners. The role of the country of origin and regionally specific motives to study in Canada are other aspects that require further investigations, and it is recommended that the study of the role of nationality in the motivation and adjustment of international students is done more deeply. Let us draw a portrait of potentially successful international students, based on our results. These students thought a lot about different options regarding getting a post-secondary education, and they independently made a decision to study abroad because it is important to them. They personally endorse this decision and feel responsibility for it. They used the advice of their friends and family members as information to think about but this advice did not press them to make the final decision. They also have a substantial amount of curiosity, interest and simple enjoyment in their motivation to go to a new place. They set a goal to get a good education and advance their career by learning at a foreign university; they want to learn new things, new languages and meet new people. They may have concerns about some conditions in their home country that they do not like, but these worries are not strong and do not serve as primary motivators for studying abroad. Before leaving their home country, they spend hours learning a new language and reading about the host country, its history, traditions, way of living and behaving, in order to prepare themselves for this challenging encounter with a new culture. Upon arrival they tried to establish a network of friends and people on whom they could rely in case of troubles and stresses. They feel open and motivated toward living the new country's way, having friends from this country and even trying to love it. The biggest limitation of this study is using predominantly questionnaire surveys when a mixed-method would be more appropriate. These surveys should be accompanied by semi-structured interviews of the students with high and low levels of autonomy and high and low beliefs of the importance of different goals and from different ethnic group. These interview data could shed the light on the correlations and predictions that we discovered with the survey methods. Although we collected data from the same group of students at different times of their academic year, a more lengthy longitudinal design should be executed in the future, when the same group of newly arrived international students is followed for one or two years, being surveyed several times a year. This longitudinal design accompanied by the participants’ interviews will allow researchers to understand more deeply the dynamics of motivational, personal and social factors in predicting and determining the optimal functioning of international students.