socer

Research Instruments The instrument that will be used to gather data consists of three parts. Part I (Appendix A) will gather demographic information of the participants. Part II (Appendix C) will measure homesickness. Parts I and III were formulated by the researchers themselves and Part II was patterned from an original homesickness questionnaire (Appendix B). Part III (Appendix D) will assess the extent and purpose of use of various web-based communication tools. The Homesickness questionnaire developed and was tested for content validity by Archer, Ireland, Amos, Broad, & Currid, L. (1998) will be used to measure homesickness. The questionnaire consists of 33 items written in short narratives, created for the use of college students. Items in the scale cover cognitive, motivational, emotional, and behavioral elements that are associated with homesickness (Appendix B). It has been used by other researchers across different cultures to measure homesickness among people leaving home for prolonged periods such as first year students in colleges, universities and cadets in military academy (Banning, 2010). The items on the scale were rated on a 5-point Likert-type format with options that ranged from strongly agree to strongly disagree, the higher the score indicates that the respondent is more homesick. For this research, nine phrases from the original items were changed for the questionnaire to be more suitable to the participants. For example, on item 29 in the original questionnaire, the phrase that was mentioned was “My parents pushed me into coming to university.” On the revised questionnaire, item 29 was altered into the phrase, “My family pushed me into accepting this work.”

The following are the assigned the points:
Strongly disagree 1
Somewhat disagree 2
Neutral 3
Somewhat agree 4
Strongly agree 5

Archer et al., (1998) reported internal consistency of .88 for the scale. Sample items in the scale include: “I can’t help