The role of intercultural transitional competence in students’ transitions on an internationalized campus – A mixed methods study

Formed from the partnership between Chinese and foreign higher educational institutions (HEIs), Sino-foreign cooperative university (SFCU) represents a typical internationalized campus that integrates various domestic and international resources (e.g., staff, students, partnerships, projects, activities, etc.) in the multicultural (academic, social, and ethnic cultures) environment. Apart from the institutional affordances, we believe students can navigate their transitions by mobilizing intercultural competence (IC). Since there is a paucity of research on that, we adopted the exploratory mixed-methods approach. First, through the qualitative (grounded theory) method, we gathered interview data from 68 students and conceptualized five dimensions of the new construct of intercultural transitional competence (ITC): multiplistic sensitivity (MS), intrinsic proactivity (IP), strategic flexibility (SF), dialectic reflexivity (DR), and relativistic inclusivity (RI). They incorporate intrapersonal, interpersonal, and person-environmental perspectives. Subsequently, we designed an ITC scale consistent with qualitative results and selected existing student transition questionnaires. Based on a valid sample of 957 students, we compared their ITC levels in terms of nationality (i.e., Chinese-international dichotomy), gender, year of study, major, and prior intercultural experiences. Moreover, we verified the positive relationship between their ITC and academic, social, and ethnic cultural transitions through the quantitative method. Practical implications are provided for HEIs to cultivate students’ ITC in order to smooth their transitions.