The Two-Way Mirror: National Status in Foreign Students’ Adjustment

The Two-Way Mirror was first published in 1960. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This is a study of images or attitudes with a two-way impact, those received and reflected by foreign students in the United States. The study seeks to determine how much the image of their native countries which they believed Americans held, influenced the foreign students in their reactions to their American experiences. Thus, the national status which a foreigner feels reflected upon him, away from home, may affect the impression of the United States which he himself reflects.The subjects of the study were 318 students from some 65 countries enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles. The largest groups were from Israel, Japan, Nationalist China, France, Germany, Iraq, Greece, Mexico, and India.This is the fifth in a series of monographs resulting from a program of research sponsored by the Committee on Cross-Cultural Education of the Social Science Research Council. It is the first volume which reports on the second phase of the research project. Each of the previous volumes, dealing with the first phase, is concerned with foreign students of a single nationality. In the present study the authors make use of facts discovered about particular nationality groups in the first series of studies to determine what factors exert the most influence upon the adjustment of foreign students from many different countries to their sojourns in the United States. The authors obtained their data through a combined questionnaire and interview technique.