Students’ Culture Shock and Cultural Intelligence: The Case of International Internship Students in Japan

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume V, Issue VII, July 2021 | ISSN 2454–6186

Students’ Culture Shock and Cultural Intelligence: The Case of International Internship Students in Japan

Irma, Elfiondri*, Oslan Amril
Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Bung Hatta, Indonesia
*Corresponding Author

Abstract: Culture shock due to failure in integrating with people from different cultural backgrounds has frequently caused some students studying or doing an internship abroad to be so disappointed, frustrated, and even stressed or depressed that they fail in their study or internship. This study examines Bung Hatta University students’ culture shock, cultural intelligence, and the effect of the students’ cultural intelligence on the students’ culture shock, who did an internship in Japan. The study has the objectives to find the students’ culture shock and their cultural intelligence concerning their culture shock. This study posits cultural intelligence in the examination doe to that cultural intelligence can act to minimize the impact of culture shock. To achieve the objectives, the study applied a quantitative method with an online survey based on the theoretical concept of culture shock. The results were that the students had low culture shock. Most of them did not get the impact of culture shock in integrating with people from the Japanese cultural environment. The students’ cultural intelligence had a positive relationship with the low culture shock. Cultural intelligence could minimize the negative impact of culture shock on the students. Most of the students did not feel culturally socked from Japanese culture. In internship activity in Japan, they could act verbally and non-verbally in integrating with Japanese people.

Keywords: Cultural Shock, Cultural Intelligence, Internship, Japanese Culture

I.INTRODUCTION

To improve students’ skills in their discipline, universities in the world send their students abroad to do various academic activities some of which are studying and doing an internship. Bung Hatta University, Indonesia does the same activity every year by sending their students to study and to do an internship in Japan. The university sends students of the Japanese Department, Faculty of Humanities to study at Sonoda Women’s University and to do an internship on hotel and tourism for a year. As international students, they have to live and integrate with people from different cultural backgrounds. International students have become a focus in cross-cultural studies Ward, Bochner, & Furnham (2001) because the students have to live and integrate with people from a new cultural environment. Living and integrating with the people can lead the students to culture shock.
Culture shock can have an impact on adaptation (Presbitero, 2016), which can lead to psychological impacts such as feeling disappointed, frustrated, and even stressed or depressed. Cultural intelligence can solve the problem of culture shock (Earley and Van Dyne, 2008), but literature review shows that very few studies discuss how cultural intelligence can solve the problem of culture shock, but according to Presbitero (2016),

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