Determinants of Depression Mood and Neurotic States among Foreign Graduate Students of Engineering at a Japanese University: An Exploratory Survey

Abstract

Recently, increasing number of overseas students enter into graduate schools in Japan to earn higher degree. Because they are in nature newcomers to Japanese culture and community, they must indispensably achieve tasks of socialization to attain their goal, especially in graduate school community. In this study, I focused on overseas graduate students’ social support and human networks gained in a certain Graduate School of Engineering in Japan to estimate their overall and discrete impacts on recent depression (CES-D) and neurotic states (GHQ-12) based on buffering and direct models. Data were obtained through a cross-sectional questionnaire survey with a sample of 126 overseas graduate students who major in engineering at a Japanese university. Results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that the buffering model better explained CES-D scores, consistent with past research, and that the direct model better explained GHQ-12 ones. Additional results obtained by ANOVAs yielded overseas graduate students, who rely exclusively upon social support gained from human network composed of the students from the same country, were less socialized to experimentation and lectures at the graduate school and had poorer human relations with their advisory professor and Japanese classmates. Implications for future study were discussed.