Abstract

The present study integrated qualitative studies on the college maladjustment of Chinese international students in South Korea using a qualitative meta-summary. Existing qualitative studies explored the difficulties that Chinese international students encounter in-depth, but it was difficult to integrate their findings because they used different methods or studied different themes. Thus, this study used a qualitative meta-summary to identify more common and general themes emerging from the existing literature. A total of 15 studies were identified in academic database. Analysis yielded 603 statements and 39 abstracted statements. The difficulties that Chinese international students faced were categorized as language stressors, educational stressors, sociocultural stressors, discrimination, and practical stressors. The most frequent abstracted statements were discrimination, language differences, and interpersonal problems caused by psychological distance. The discussion compared Korea’s socio-cultural characteristics reflected on the findings with those of the United States. The implications for future research and the suggestions for the changes of university communities were discussed.