Social Capital Generation through Interaction between Civil Society Organizations and International Students in Japan: Qualitative Case Study in the Kansai Area

• In Event: Publication mentoring workshop session
  In Special Session: International & Intercultural Education - Group A

Proposal

• This research is carried out at Ritsumeikan University (Kyoto, Japan) under the academic supervision of Professor Kenki Adachi.
• The main objective of this research is to identify the role and contribution of civil society to the internationalization of higher education in Japan through assisting incoming foreign students in their sociocultural adaptation.
• The study is guided by the following questions: 1) what motivates CSOs in the Kansai area to get involved with the international students and 2) how effective their involvement is for assisting students’ adaptation to Japanese society? To help answer the main research questions, the following background questions are also explored: what types of CSOs engage with international students; how closely they are related to the government and/or private sector; what types of issues they are willing to address; what strong points and areas of improvement of their approach and activities are.
• The thesis statement: Interaction between CSOs and international students in Japan should be facilitated as it helps improve the students’ quality of life, assists them in their sociocultural adaptation and may encourage them to stay in Japan for work after graduation.
• Social capital theory based primarily on Putnam’s tradition serves as a main conceptual framework for this study and an umbrella theory. Besides, organizational theories and motivation theories are used to clarify motivations of the CSOs to get involved with international students and social capital theory to measure the effectiveness of their activities. The study builds on extensive scholarship on civil society in Japan and internationalization of Japanese universities and intends to bring these two critical concepts together by using social capital theory.
• This is a qualitative study relying on methods on participant observation, semi-structured in-depth interviews and textual analysis of key documents of relevant organizations. The author has visited, participated in activities of over 20 CSOs in the Kansai area of Japan: mainly small non-profits and volunteer groups across four prefectures: Hyogo, Osaka, Kyoto and Shiga, and interviewed their representatives. Interviews have also been conducted with over 15 international graduated students studying in Japan in English to explore their experiences of interacting with CSOs on and off campus, and with two university staff to examine their perspective on CSO engagement with international students.
• Results and findings of this research are expected to further contribute to understanding of the nature of civil society, practices and patterns that CSOs use to productively engage with international students and ways to generate and maximize social capital.
• The author identified the topic and started data collection in January 2017; the dissertation proposal with current thesis structure was approved by the committee in June 2018. Due to some changes in perspective and outline, data collection was re-started again alongside with data analysis of the previously collected data. Since October 2018, the writing stage has begun. The dissertation defense is currently scheduled for the fall semester 2019.

Author

• Polina Ivanova, Ritsumeikan University