International Journal of

ADVANCED AND APPLIED SCIENCES

EISSN: 2313-3724, Print ISSN: 2313-626X

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 Volume 11, Issue 4 (April 2024), Pages: 52-61

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 Original Research Paper

Psychometric properties and measurement invariance of the sociocultural adjustment scale among international students in Malaysia

 Author(s): 

 Cui En 1, Mohd Roslan Rosnon 1, *, Zeinab Zaremohzzabieh 2, Muhammad Afiq Abd. Razak 1, Samir Muhazzab Amin 1

 Affiliation(s):

 1Faculty of Human Ecology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
 2Institute for Social Science Studies, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, 43400, Selangor, Malaysia

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 * Corresponding Author. 

  Corresponding author's ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4903-7368

 Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

 https://doi.org/10.21833/ijaas.2024.04.007

 Abstract

The sociocultural adaptation scale is a tool commonly used to assess how international students adjust to new cultures. Although it has been shown to be useful, there's little proof that it works well for students in non-Western countries. Our study aimed to create and test a version of this tool for international students in Malaysia, with 428 participants. We looked at whether the tool worked the same way for people of different genders, ages, and academic majors. At first, our results showed that the tool was not a perfect fit, but after careful adjustments, including removing items that did not fit well and improving how items were linked, we significantly improved how well the tool worked. The updated tool effectively measures how well international students adapt to new cultures. Moreover, our study found that the tool worked consistently across different demographic groups, offering new insights into how gender, age, and academic major affect students' sociocultural adaptation. These findings make the tool more useful in various settings and help us better understand the complex factors that influence how international students adjust to living in multicultural environments.

 © 2024 The Authors. Published by IASE.

 This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

 Keywords

 Sociocultural adaptation, International students, Malaysia, Factorial model invariance, Cultural adjustment

 Article history

 Received 16 November 2023, Received in revised form 27 February 2024, Accepted 29 March 2024

 Acknowledgment 

The authors thank the Universiti Putra Malaysia for the Putra Grant–GP/2018/9653200 award for the financial support and those involved in this research. Some of the data and contents in this paper were excerpted from the research on Challenges Identification and Strategies Development in Enhancing Internationalization Policies of Higher Education in Malaysia.

 Compliance with ethical standards

 Conflict of interest: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

 Citation:

 En C, Rosnon MR, Zaremohzzabieh Z, Abd. Razak MA, and Amin SM (2024). Psychometric properties and measurement invariance of the sociocultural adjustment scale among international students in Malaysia. International Journal of Advanced and Applied Sciences, 11(4): 52-61

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 Tables

 Table 1 Table 2 Table 3 

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