Intercultural relationship development and higher education internationalisation: a qualitative investigation based on a three-stage ecological and person-in-context conceptual framework

This qualitative study scrutinised the experiences of intercultural relationship development between international and domestic students at two Japanese private universities, which have contrastive degrees of commitment to internationalisation in regard to stated vision, curriculum, international student enrolment and languages of instruction. Kudo et al.’s (Higher Education, 77(3), 473–489, 2019) three-stage ecological and person-in-context conceptual framework was adopted to gain insight into the roles of institutional internationalisation and personal agency in intercultural relationship development. A thematic analysis of interview data from 32 students (14 domestics, 18 internationals) revealed that institutional internationalisation may play a relatively small role in promoting intercultural relationship development compared to students’ agency. A detailed examination of the associations between three forms of agency (i.e. situated, cosmopolitan and creative) and three relational stages (i.e. interactivity, reciprocity and unity) led to the identification of cosmopolitan agency as a meaningful hallmark of intercultural relationship development. These findings call for future research aimed at identifying the environmental and individual conditions that are most conducive to the cultivation of cosmopolitan agency in both international and domestic students.