Johannes will travel to the The 10th Biennial Congress of the
International Academy for Intercultural Research, June 25 through 29, 2017 in New York.

You can hear his talk about public perceptions of international students or just meet up for a chat on common research interests.

Abstract: A substantial number of students around the globe, close to 4.5 million in 2012 with estimates increasing to 7.2 million by 2025, pursued higher education outside of their country of origin. To realize the psychological, social, economic and academic benefits of international education, it is important to understand how these international students are received into educational institutions and the wider society. A key question, therefore, is: what shapes the public attitudes and behavior towards international students?

In the current study, we aimed to partially replicate and extend Ward and Masgoret’s (2006) integrative model of attitudes toward immigrants. We do this by applying the model to international students and by extending it from attitudes to helping behaviors. We conducted the research with 526 community members in New Zealand who participated in a telephone survey that assessed, multicultural ideology, perceptions of realistic and symbolic threat, intergroup anxiety, and contact with, attitudes towards, and helping behavior aimed at international students.

We proposed and tested a model, using pathway analysis, in which contact and multicultural ideology predicted attitudes towards international students, partially mediated by threat, and attitudes predicted a greater willingness to help international students. The data showed a good fit to the model with the addition of a path from contact to helping behavior and the moderation of the relationship between attitudes and helping by intergroup anxiety. The fit was χ2 (7, N = 526) = 15.68, CMIN/df = 2.24, p < .05; CFI = .99; RMSEA = .05, LO90 = .02, HI90 = .08

The results are discussed in relation to the Integrated Threat Theory (ITT) and point to a novel way to use ITT to understand the formation of public attitudes towards international students and the transition from those attitudes to behavior.

Download the Presentation.