The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 1 - 79

Influence of Language Skills

examine Chinese international students' perception of their residential experiences with
domestic students.
Utilizing sense of belonging as a framework for this inquiry assists in understanding
Chinese students' overall feelings of membership in their residential community. Emphasis on sense of belonging is appropriate in
this study because it "illustrates the interplay
between the individual and the institution"
(Johnson et al., 2007, p. 526), which participants' English language ability affects.

METHODOLOGY
I used a phenomenological orientation, which
allowed me to understand the lived experiences (Van Manen, 1990) of participants through
an interpretive lens that situated these experiences within a speciﬁc context (Merriam,
2009). As the researcher, my role was to
examine participants' insights that brought
me into direct contact with the participants'
world and explore how they understood the
deep meanings of their experiences (Rossman
& Rallis, 2003). I examined participants' descriptions of their lived realities in their residence halls to determine what participants
had in common by reducing "individual experiences with a phenomenon to a description of
the universal essence" (Creswell, 2007, p. 58).
The essence of the phenomenon was revealed
though a "systematic attempt to uncover and
describe the structures, the internal meaning
structures, of lived experience" (Van Manen,
1990, p. 10). With a phenomenological orientation, I examined the nature of Chinese
international students' lived experiences to
better understand their realities within their
residential environment.

Site Selection and Participants
The selected institution was Midwest University (MWU; pseudonym), a large, public
land-grant research institution in the Midwest
with over 33,000 undergraduate students enrolled in fall 2012. MWU was ranked in the
top 10 U.S. institutions with high international
student enrollment in 2012-13 (Institute of
International Education, 2013), and approximately one in eight ﬁrst-year MWU students
identiﬁed China as his or her country of origin.
All ﬁrst-year, non-commuter students are required to live on campus, and in 2012-13, 96%
of all ﬁrst year students resided on campus.
Thus, most undergraduate Chinese students
experience living on campus during their ﬁrst
year of college. The residential requirements
and international emphasis at MWU provide
valuable context for examining residential experiences of Chinese international students.
Participants were selected through purposeful sampling, used when "the investigator
wants to discover, understand, and gain insight
and therefore must select a sample from which
the most can be learned" (Merriam, 2009, p.
77). Recruitment emails were sent to eligible
participants from the university's Ofﬁce of the
Registrar. First-year undergraduate Chinese international students who lived in the residence
halls were intentionally solicited for the study.
All 21 participants were ﬁrst-year students
from China who entered MWU in fall 2012.
Participants included six males and 15 females.

Data Collection and Analysis
In-depth in-person interviews were conducted
with each participant in English. All ﬁrst interviews were conducted before the 2013 spring
semester ended. Second round interviews

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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 1

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