# Construction of the Cross-Cultural Interaction Model for International Students Based on Big Data Analysis

Authors: Zhisong Wang; Shuhong Gao
Journal: Scientific Programming
 (2022)

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## Abstract

Culture is an important feature that distinguishes human beings from animals. Human beings have created and developed various cultures and influenced people’s psychology and behavior in different social forms. With the continuous improvement of China’s international influence and cultural soft power, the number of foreign students studying in China is increasing year by year. In this paper, data mining is carried out on the data of international students, and the cross-cultural interaction model of international students is constructed. According to the characteristics of the research object, this paper explores the influence of cultural novelty and psychological capital on its cross-cultural adaptation in order to provide theoretical basis for the improvement of cross-cultural adaptation. It also promotes the better development of international students and the improvement of international exchange management in colleges and universities by providing some ideas for mental health education and management of international students. The importance of cultural study for international students in China is related not only to the development and improvement of foreign students’ cognitive level of target culture, but also to the external communication of national cultural image.


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## Body

## 1. Introduction

The trend of economic globalization not only brings closer economic and political exchanges between countries, but also brings more frequent educational exchanges and more developed educational services trade, resulting in the international study abroad fever [1]. International students will form their own understanding and cognition of Chinese image and culture while studying and living in China, and they will also bring their defined Chinese image back to their home country once their studies are completed [2]. International students in China can learn about foreign cultures and broaden their horizons by studying abroad, but coming from their home country to the host country also means dealing with cultural differences [3, 4]. In order to provide a comfortable learning and living environment for international students studying in China, the Ministry of Education and universities are constantly improving relevant procedures, education management systems, and professional training plans for international students studying in China, as well as allocating a large amount of funds to improve the hardware construction level of universities [5]. In this new era, data is no longer simply piled up and stored, and the ability to filter and utilize data is the criterion to judge whether a system can handle and load big data.As messengers of cultural exchanges, international students lay human capital and cultural capital for bilateral coordinated development and further deepen international cooperation [6]. At present, there are millions of students studying abroad all over the world, and the number of international students has reached an unprecedented scale and leap-forward development. The process of cultural adaptation is also a complex process of resocialization or “secondary growth” [7]. The final academic and study quality of overseas students depends on the effectiveness of solving the adaptation problems in language, environment, eating habits, studies, and so on, and the effective adaptability has a great influence [8]. If the foreign students cannot effectively face the cultural impact of the host country, maladjustment will also damage their mental health, which to some extent means the failure of foreign students’ families and national education investment [9]. The effect of foreign students’ cultural learning not only is related to their cross-cultural life experience, but also affects the external communication effect of Chinese culture to a great extent [10]. Therefore, paying attention to the significance of foreign students’ cultural study in China is not only conducive to the development and improvement of foreign students’ cognitive level of target culture, but also related to the external communication of national cultural image. According to the characteristics of the research object, this paper explores the influence of cultural novelty and psychological capital on its cross-cultural adaptation and carries out data mining on the data of international students to build a cross-cultural interaction model for international students.With the rapid development of international education in China, the country has risen to become the world’s third largest destination country and Asia’s largest. As a result, academic circles are paying more attention to research on international students in China [11]. International students’ cross-cultural adaptation has become a source of concern. As a result, education administrators should prioritize learning how to effectively educate and manage international students, as well as improving their cross-cultural interaction [12]. Positive self-efficacy, a positive outlook on life, and tenacious willpower are all important factors in international students’ cross-cultural adaptation activities in China [13]. As a result, educational institutions must provide timely, scientific, and comprehensive cultural adaptation counseling to international students in China, in order to improve the continuous release of collective internal pressure by international students in China and then to strengthen their individual psychological resilience. The degree of difference between the culture of the home country and the culture of the country of residence recognized by people living in other countries is referred to as cultural novelty [14]. Because of individual differences, everyone has different cultural understanding of the home country and the target country. Understanding cultural distance with cultural novelty can better reflect cultural differences from the individual level. In this study, a mixed research method combining qualitative and quantitative methods was adopted, and the research steps were planned according to the exploratory sequence design scheme. This paper probes into the influence of cultural novelty and psychological capital on their cross-cultural adaptation. Data mining is carried out on the data of international students, and the cross-cultural interaction model of international students is constructed. This paper analyzes the influence of gender, time in China, Chinese proficiency, and country on the use of cultural learning strategies by foreign students.


## 2. Related Work

The cross-cultural adaptation of international students in China is a material derived from the integration of individual international students and the external ecological environment, according to [15], which is based on the cross-cultural adaptation model from the perspective of psychological capital. From the perspective of psychological capital, [16] discusses the management of a cross-cultural adaptation model for Chinese students. Reference [17] examines cultural learning strategies that have not been thoroughly explored in the field of second language learning strategies from the perspective of cross-cultural communication. Reference [18] develops a survey tool to analyze the current situation of cultural learning strategies used by international students in China, as well as a classification system for cultural learning strategies for international students in China. In addition, it investigates the factors that influence cultural learning strategies. Reference [19] discusses and analyzes the factors influencing cross-cultural adaptation from the perspective of cross-cultural adaptation, using interview and questionnaire research methods. Reference [20] points out that individuals and groups in cross-cultural contact will adopt strategies for acculturation, and two important issues related to strategies are the preservation of the original culture or the contact and participation of the new culture. Reference [21] holds that the definition of “culture” is the conceptual basis for constructing the theoretical framework of cultural learning research. Without a reasonable definition and explanation of culture, it is difficult to scientifically define and substantively discuss the connotation, content, and purpose of cultural learning. Reference [22] points out that individuals and groups in cross-cultural contact will adopt strategies for acculturation, and two important issues related to strategies are the preservation of the original culture or the contact and participation of the new culture. In this paper, data mining [23] is carried out on the data of international students, and the cross-cultural interaction model of international students is constructed, thereby providing theoretical support for cross-cultural adaptation research, especially providing theoretical analysis and explanation for cross-cultural adaptation of international students with different cultural distances.


## 3. Analysis of Influencing Factors of Cross-Cultural Adaptation

Culture is an important feature that distinguishes people from animals. Human beings have created culture, which in turn influences individual psychology and behavior. When people move from one cultural situation to another, they show psychological uneasiness and behavioral discomfort due to the constraints of the original cultural elements, but culture is learnable and dynamic, and people also have initiative. Therefore, when people enter the second cultural situation, they will make adjustments to changes, that is, cross-cultural adaptation, which is embodied in psychological adjustment and the acquisition and application of the second cultural elements.With the advent of the era of economic globalization, it has not only greatly promoted the development of Chinese economy and culture, but also brought the upsurge of studying abroad. As a bridge of cultural exchange, international students studying in China lay a good human foundation for the coordinated development between countries. It is the program written by culture and placed in people’s mind in advance. These programs are the entirety of people’s life style in a broad sense in a specific society. They are the one-benefit and collective spirit programs, which determine individual emotions [24], behaviors, and cognition [25]. However, different from computers, human beings as individuals are an open and active system. On the one hand, their behaviors are partially controlled by mental programs, but on the other hand, people may deviate from or modify this program by exerting their individual initiative, showing new ways of emotion, behavior, and cognition. With the increasing number of Chinese students studying in China, to some extent, it has effectively promoted the two-way development of national economy and traditional culture. However, there are still some adverse effects; that is, a large number of international students studying in China have a series of potential unstable factors, the most well-known performance of which is the problem of cultural adaptation.The psychological adjustment that people make to their social environment is known as adaptation. Every stage of a person’s life, including childhood, adolescence, middle age, old age, and death, involves psychological adjustment and change, which is the process of adjusting to one’s social environment. Self-acceptance, self-enrichment, satisfaction, happiness, and other outcomes of adaptation can be seen. On the contrary, even physical and mental organizations are harmed and dysfunctional. The cultural distance between the two countries is an objective measure of their cultural similarities. Some people believe that psychological distance is caused by spatial geographical distance or cultural circle. Cross-cultural anxiety is almost a necessary stage for every international student, but it is difficult to manage and can even cause physical discomfort. For cross-cultural adaptation, cultivating international students’ positive attitude toward life and optimistic quality is critical [26]. In practice, group counseling can be used to teach international students to form positive attribution styles, to use their own advantages to increase self-awareness, to enable international students to gain positive energy, and to use these forces to adapt to cross-cultural life, according to the explanatory style theory, expectation theory, and learned optimism theory.Individuals can acquire and use their inner strength to improve themselves in a short time and overcome the obstacles of cross-cultural adaptation. Its flexibility, benefits, and investment characteristics make psychological capital become a more attractive way to adjust the level of cross-cultural adaptation. The influencing factors of cross-cultural adaptation are shown in Figure1.Figure 1
Influencing factors of cross-cultural adaptation.From the perspective of culture, cross-culture can be understood as cultural identity; that is, the attribution and acceptance of a particular culture by cross-cultural groups or individuals is a culture that crosses the boundaries of different countries and nationalities and has its specific value orientation. Cross-cultural adaptation is a complicated process. At present, there are many cross-cultural interaction models put forward by academic circles, and the research focuses on many explicit influencing factors. However, most models seem to regard cultural adaptation as passive behavior and develop many more negative concepts. We know from the investigation and research that international students have a high rate of mental illness at this time. International students’ cross-cultural misadjustment not only has a negative impact on their personal development, but also has a negative impact on the overall social development and causes some intercountry contradictions. Cross-culture is a social phenomenon that emerges in the course of human history’s continuous evolution and is unavoidable. The rise in social mobility and the cohabitation of different ethnic groups are the primary causes of this phenomenon. The cross-cultural phenomenon will become increasingly obvious as the globalization era progresses. In the collision and integration of different cultures, the essence of this phenomenon is to change traditional and existing cultures and to create new cultures.


## 4. Cross-Cultural Interaction Model of International Students Based on Big Data Analysis

At present, self-awareness and ability of international students in China are the main factors that affect cross-cultural adaptation. It mainly includes the self-learning experience, personal experience, physical function of foreign students in China, and the self-coping ability of the external living environment changes. The cross-cultural interaction model based on big data is a descriptive model, which is based on the understanding of the changing characteristics of cross-cultural adaptation and psychological capital. The three adaptations explore the emotional, behavioral, and academic state of international students from different analytical frameworks, as shown in Figure2.Figure 2
Structural model of students’ cross-cultural adaptation.People’s adaptation implies that people may change the social environment. It is possible for people to change the social environment, but it is more likely for people to change when they only have group strength. The energy for the state can be defined as(1)Δwjk=ηδkoyj=ηdk−ok1−okokyj,Δvij=ηδjyxi=∑k=1lδkowjk1−yjyjxi.Deep mining data, using radial basis function:(2)px,y=∑x1y1−nxy¯n−1sxsy=n∑x1y1−∑x1∑y1n∑x12−∑x12n∑y12−∑y12.By polynomial kernel function:(3)Tx,y=x•yx2×y2=∑x1y1∑x12∑y12.When the parameters are fixed, it is simplified as follows:(4)dx,y=∑x1−y12.Positive psychological adaptation, from a cognitive standpoint, entails forming an objective and rational view of oneself and the host country group, as well as implementing integration strategies in cultural situation transformation. However, due to international students’ limited residence time and the constraints of academic tasks, it is difficult to form an objective and rational viewpoint in a short period of time. For international students’ cross-cultural adaptation, positive self-efficacy, an upbeat attitude, a sense of hope, and perseverance are essential factors. Conscious psychological capital exercises can help people better understand stress and increase their psychological resilience to it. The cross-cultural interaction model based on big data and psychological capital is shown in Figure3.Figure 3
Cross-cultural interaction model.The cognitive process is influenced not only by individual factors affecting international students, but also by the host society’s overall attitude toward foreigners, i.e., openness and acceptance of foreigners. International students with a strong sense of hope will set attainable goals, plan specific and attainable paths to achieve those goals, dare to overcome obstacles, and carry out the plan, and it will be difficult to give up halfway due to external influences. As a result, a group intervention program tailored to international students can be designed to improve their hope quality and assist them in experiencing happiness while participating in cultural exchange. Because most international students in China are nondegree students with a short stay in China (more than half of the time spent in China by Wood Research Institute is less than a year), cognitive factors are not considered in the psychological adaptation results. It is critical for cross-cultural adaptation to cultivate international students’ positive outlook on life and optimistic quality.Data preprocessing is a part of data mining in a broad sense. The data preprocessing work in this project is as follows. There are two relationships between the previous database fields: functional relationship and correlation relationship. An arbitrary n-dimensional to m-dimensional mapping can be accomplished with a three-layer neural network. The number of neurons in the hidden layer iss=n+m+a, and n and m are the number of nodes in the input and output layers, respectively. The activation function of the neurons in the hidden layer is selected as the hyperbolic tangent function, and the function form is(5)fx=ex−e−xex+e−x.The activation function of the output layer uses Sigmoid excitation function, which is in the form of(6)fx=11+e−x.The induced local domain of a neuronJ in the hidden layer is(7)vjp=∑i=1nwijxi−θj.The induced local domain of a neuronK in the output layer is(8)vkp=∑j=1swjkvjp−θk,where n and s are the number of neurons in the input layer and the hidden layer, respectively.In practice, group counseling can be used to teach international students to form positive attribution styles, to use their own advantages to increase self-awareness, to enable international students to gain positive energy, and to use these forces to adapt to cross-cultural life, according to the explanatory style theory, expectation theory, and learned optimism theory. The self-identification of international students with Chinese traditional culture and their understanding of international cultural differences severely impedes their own development. In the process of self-cross-cultural adaptation, the material capital and social capital in the self-capital of foreign students in China have become an indispensable part of their self-growth. The mobilization of resilience mechanisms in the adaptation process will, to some extent, encourage international students in China to solve problems in the process of adaptation in a scientific and reasonable manner.


## 5. Result Analysis and Discussion

At present, a large number of experimental data prove that self-efficacy is closely related to external life situations. It is inevitable that foreign students in China will encounter some problems when they first come to China. At this time, the self-efficacy of foreign students in China begins to play a role. There are significant differences in the dimensions of daily life adaptation in three variables: gender, cross-cultural experience, and religious belief. It is more difficult for men who have cross-cultural adaptation and religious beliefs to adapt to daily culture, which shows that daily life adaptation is the most basic content for foreign students to contact with different cultures. Maybe men are less careful about trivial matters of daily life than women, and they are more likely to find it difficult to adapt to daily life. Cross-cultural experience also makes it easy for international students to constantly compare the differences of various cultures in the past, but it is even more difficult for them to let go to adapt to the new environment.Specific intervention strategies to improve foreign students’ self-efficacy include the following: during the actual enrollment process, the school should organize activities to help students better adapt to cross-cultural situations, so that foreign students in the class can continuously improve their self-efficacy while participating in activities, and provide them with a superior learning environment on campus. It is necessary to design role exchange activities between international students and Chinese students in the actual teaching activities, as well as to continue to increase the analysis of actual cases. We can effectively help international students fully experience the fun of learning by constantly stimulating their positive emotions and then comprehensively improving their actual survival and learning ability.Hope is a positive psychological mechanism and a new field of positive psychology research that involves an individual’s desire to achieve a specific goal. Hope influences not only an individual’s life satisfaction, but also his or her coping style and ability to effectively overcome obstacles. In this way, hope affects an individual’s difficult coping in a new cultural environment. Hope influences not only the degree of self-satisfaction of international students, but also their ability to overcome external challenges to some extent. We need to make mandatory intervention for foreign students who are having difficulties in China right away in order to effectively improve their self-efficacy and actual survival ability. International students with a strong sense of hope will set achievable goals, plan specific and feasible paths to achieve those goals, dare to overcome obstacles, and carry out the plan, and it is difficult to give up halfway due to external influences. Using this model to analyze various data of international students, we get the change curve of cultural novelty and social and cultural adaptation as shown in Figure4. The curve of cultural novelty and depression is shown in Figure 5. The curve of psychological capital and social and cultural adaptation changes is shown in Figure 6.Figure 4
Changes of cultural novelty and social and cultural adaptation.Figure 5
Cultural novelty and the result of depression change.Figure 6
Psychological capital and social culture adapt to the changing results.As can be seen from the above figures, there is a significant positive correlation between cultural novelty and social and cultural adaptation. There is no significant correlation between cultural novelty and depression. Psychological capital is negatively correlated with social and cultural adaptation. The data analysis methods used in this study are mainly divided into qualitative data and quantitative data analysis methods. As far as the analytical perspective of qualitative research is concerned, on the one hand, this study emphasizes the interpretation perspective of data center and tries to abandon the unverified speculation held by itself, so as to prevent subjective and one-sided interpretation of interview materials. However, on the other hand, in order to ensure the breadth and depth of qualitative data analysis, it is necessary for researchers to obtain corresponding theoretical guidance on the methodology of data interpretation, which can not only make an overall description of the use of foreign students’ cultural learning strategies, but also make a partial close-up of the influence and effectiveness of specific strategies. For the analysis of quantitative data, this study uses statistical software for processing. From the results of the study, we can see that cultural novelty sometimes has a positive relationship with cross-cultural adaptation, while sometimes it has a negative relationship. It shows that there is a variable that affects the direction and strength of the relationship between cultural novelty and cross-cultural adaptation. As far as this study is concerned, psychological capital can be considered as the moderating variable.Education must provide multilevel learning tasks for international students, ranging from simple to complex, so that students can continuously improve their ability to solve problems in a stable state, thereby fully stimulating international students’ motivation and continuously improving related cultural adaptation functions. Individuals’ sense of hope can be improved more effectively through group intervention, according to studies. As a result, a group intervention program tailored to international students can be developed to improve their hope quality and assist them in experiencing happiness through cultural exchange. It can specifically assist international students in setting short-term goals with small steps while also stimulating their path thinking and dynamic thinking, that is, increasing their cognitive belief in their ability to find the target path and increasing their motivation to move forward along the target path. This model is compared to an existing model to ensure that it performs as expected, as shown in Figure7.Figure 7
Comparison results of running time of two methods.It can be seen that this method is faster than the existing methods in operation time and is superior to the existing methods on the whole. The method used in this paper is the principal component analysis of data. However, the first problem encountered in the process of data principal component analysis is how to analyze unknown types of data. Here, we use several numbers as dummy variables of the form. If there are only two categories of target data, such as gender data, we can simply set one category as 1 and the other categories as 0. However, some data items contain two or more variables. Therefore, using multiple dummy variables to analyze data is a solution, so it is necessary to build more variables with numbers to represent multiple data types. People with high self-efficacy handle things rationally and dare to accept challenges. Comparing this algorithm with other algorithms, the calculation error is shown in Figure8.Figure 8
Comparison results of calculation errors of different methods.It can be seen from Figure8 that the other two algorithms have higher errors. On the whole, compared with the other two algorithms, this algorithm has smaller error and higher accuracy. The superiority of this method is further proved. The cultural distance perceived by graduate students is smaller, and the cultural distance perceived by foreign students with more friends is smaller. And the variables of age and length of stay in China are further found in back testing. The scores of cultural novelty of international students aged 18 are significantly higher than those of international students under 18; that is, they perceive that there is a small gap between the culture of the host country and that of the home country. It shows that, due to the increase of experience, the perception of cultural differences may be low. However, the international students who have been in China for the longest time have the smallest perceived cultural distance, reaching a statistically significant level. It can be seen that time is a factor that affects the cultural novelty of international students. With the familiarity with the environment, the strangeness of foreign students will gradually disappear. Exploratory factor analysis of the data, as a validity test, can also determine whether the strategy dimension divided by qualitative research can be supported in the data, and orthogonal rotation is carried out by principal component analysis and maximum variance rotation method.A five-factor social and cultural adaptation scale can be obtained after exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Cultural value adaptation, day-to-day life adaptation, pressure and risk adaptation, social interaction adaptation, and language skills are some of them. The validity and reliability of the data are both satisfactory. This paper uses a mixed research method to look at international students’ cultural learning strategies in qualitative data and statistically explain how they are used in quantitative data. The mixed research method can not only broaden the types of data sources and increase the number of participants, but also investigate how foreign students in China use cultural strategies through various research paths, enhancing the credibility of the research findings.


## 6. Conclusions

This paper investigates the cross-cultural adaptation of international students in China at the individual level through a literature review, questionnaire survey, and statistical analysis that combines descriptive and inferential statistics. The main findings of the cross-cultural adaptation research of international students in China will be summarized on this basis, and effective strategies for optimizing international student management in colleges and universities will be discussed based on the findings and theories of this research. This paper investigates the impact of cultural novelty and psychological capital on cross-cultural adaptation and conducts data mining on international student data to develop a cross-cultural interaction model for international students, based on the characteristics of the research object. The state should refine the entrance examination standards for international students in China, improve the preparatory education system for international students in China, and improve the training mode for international students’ education and management professionals, among other suggestions and countermeasures for cross-cultural adaptation guidance for international students in China. Colleges and universities in China should improve humanistic care and mental health education for international students, as well as innovate international student education and management methods. International students should focus on improving their personal willpower, continually strengthening their knowledge reserves and social practice abilities, gradually expanding their personal social circle, actively accepting Chinese culture, and striving to improve their Chinese learning and application ability.



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