| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000)
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| Research Abstract |
There are three new types of cultural environment for a freshman/woman newly enrolled in a college/university: college life, local community, and independent single life. Local students will be involved in new college life only. However, the students from other than the local district supposedly face with a new local community, and, if they cannot commute, they have to live single in a dormitory or an apartment. As local communities, Kansai and Okinawa areas were chosen and university students were surveyed as to difficulties they first met, changes of life style, and feelings about local community by using a questionnaire or semi-structured interviews.
The data from 244 students in University of Ryukyu and 161 students in Kobe University were analyzed. Even though Kansai and Okinawa are belonging to very different cultures historically, many difficulties, changes of life style, and feelings about local community were quite similar. Non-local students showed more difficulties and a correlational analyses depicted the number of difficulties increase when time and financial costs to get home increase. Higher increase the cost to get back home, more likely the students can put up with their solitude. On the other hand, longer become the time to get back home, more likely the students have a negative image to the local community.
A student learn something new to cope with a specific problem. Sometimes they escape from the problem, or just to put up with. Adaptation to a new cultural environment is not a simple process as a function of time, but a whole set in which each difficulty and problem was coped with and overcome. Even adaptation process itself produces new difficulties that did not exist at the beginning. The same process could be observed in cultural adaptation process the people experience in another country.
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