Effects of Intercultural Friendships on the Life Style of University Students in Rawalpindi and Islamabad

Abstract

Intercultural friendships have become increasingly significant in university settings due to the nature of higher education which makes it possible for students to meet people different in their ethnicity, language, regionality, sociability, and culture. This research focuses on the association between intercultural friendship and chosen aspects of students' lives at the universities in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, especially lifestyle change, friendship behavior, communication behavior, and academic behavior. The current study is based on Kim’s theory of cross-cultural adaptation as well as Ting-Toomey’s identity negotiation theory. Quantitative cross-sectional survey was conducted using sample of 120 students from the International Islamic University, Islamabad and Pir Mehr Ali Shah Arid Agriculture University, Rawalpindi. There were sixty students from each university involved in the survey. Data were collected by means of structured questionnaire with demographic information and 25 five-point Likert-scale statements divided into five dimensions The questionnaire had high levels of internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = .90), as evident from its pilot testing among 30 students. The use of descriptive statistics and independent-samples t-tests was made during analysis. According to the results obtained, intercultural friendship is quite common among the respondents and it is linked more to the development of social and communicative characteristics rather than to the considerable shifts in deeply embedded lifestyle habits. Respondents mentioned that they became more tolerant, respectful towards cultural differences, confident in intercultural interaction, effective in their communication and exposed to new languages or expressions. At the same time, food preferences and clothes styles did not undergo any considerable transformations. Moreover, educational outcomes were considered by most of the participants to be minimal, which implies that the establishment of friendship does not necessarily result in academic advantages without any collaboration. No statistically significant differences were found in composite comparisons between males and females as well as between the students from Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

Keywords: Intercultural friendship, Lifestyle change, University students, Cross-cultural adaptation Identity negotiation, Communication behaviour, Pakistan