Date of Award

1-1-2024

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Kimberly Colvin

Committee Members

David Yun Dai, Dina Refki

Keywords

Academic success, International students, Item response theory, Social well-being

Subject Categories

Educational Psychology

Abstract

There has been an increase in the number of international students coming to the United States to study. For school administrators and teachers to provide appropriate support for international students, it is important to use an appropriate scale to understand the well-being of this population. The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a scale that measures the social well-being of international students and examine the relationship between social well-being and some dimensions of academic success. The study occurred across three phases: 1) item development, 2) assessment of psychometric properties of the scale, and 3) assessment of the relationship between social well-being and academic success. During item development, out of 78 preliminary items, 43 items were removed based on reviews by expert panels and cognitive interviews. With a sample of 701 international undergraduate and graduate students, the SWBI with 35 items was administered. An additional two questions were removed based on low item-total correlations and low discrimination parameters from the item response theory assessment. The final SWBI displayed good internal consistency with a Cronbach’s alpha of .94 and acceptable range of item-total correlations of all 33 items. Convergent validity was established with a significant positive association with the measures of life satisfaction. A principal component analysis yielded a single-factor structure for SWBI, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) results confirmed a good fit. Lastly, correlational analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between SWBI with some dimensions of academic success. The results showed that self-efficacy and perceptions of learning environments were significantly correlated with the social well-being of international students while no relationship was found between social well-being and GPA. Taken together, the SWBI scale developed through this study was a reliable and valid scale and could be used to measure the social well-being of international students. Significant relationships were found between the social well-being of international students and some dimensions of academic success. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

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