Airtex Coursework

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Result

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Figure 1. This chart indicates that the equal amounts of international students in each variable have chosen “easy” and “not very difficult”. This demonstrates that 70% of all respondents are not aware of cooking for themselves.

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Figure 2. This bar chart shows that 50% of female international students choose “difficult” of communicating with native English students. The percentages of male and female respondents’ who think it is ok to communicate with native English students are same (both are 30%).

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Figure 3. This bar chart indicates that equal amounts of respondents in each variable have chosen ‘Once a month’ (not very difficult). 60% of female respondents need to escape campus to relax once a week (quite difficult).

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Figure 4. This bar chart demonstrates that 60% of female respondents never communicate with UK students (very difficult). In contrast, 60% of male respondents communicate with UK students every day (easy).

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Figure 5. All the male respondents were unanimous in their answer to this question, they never cried when they attended a UK university (easy). Half of the female respondents cried once when they attended a UK university, but no one cried every few days (not very difficult).

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Figure 6. This chart indicates that the majority of female international students and half of the male international students do not have native friends (very difficult). The number of male respondents who have over three native friends is as twice as female respondents (easy).

Discussion

The hypothesis of this report is that female international students are more likely to find difficulties adapting to UK University life than male international students. In figure 4 it appears that male respondents are more sociable, especially when they come to new environments, they are more likely to socialize with the locals. Helen (2012) claims that “men like taking risks and experiment. Moreover, men are more independent in their actions.” However, this is an over-generalization because it is a fact that there are also many women who are equally as risk-taking and independent as men. Despite the fact, the results of this survey show that the majority male respondents are more willing to take the initiative to adapt to the new environment and communicate with the UK students to integrate into UK university life. By contrast, female respondents do not seem to like communicating with UK students. This variance may be due to differences in personality between male and female. It could be that only the female respondents in this report were shy and that due to the limited number of respondents it is not possible to generalize. Moreover, from figure 6, we can find that the majority of male respondents and female respondents have no local friends, which further confirms that the female international students’ adaptability is not necessarily worse than the male international students. In conclusion, it may be suggested that the female respondents in Cardiff we spoke to tend towards finding it difficult to socialize. The respondents confirmed this element of the report’s hypothesis, although generalizing from the small number of respondents is a difficult task.

The purpose of this report is to investigate the relationship between gender and adaptability to life in UK universities. In figure 5 all the male respondents were unanimous in their answer, all male respondents never cried since they attended a UK university. However, half of the female respondents have cried once since they attended a UK university. This finding could be due to the fact that ‘women have more tear glands than men, because women's brains are more sensitive to emotional responses. Men rarely cry in front of others because it might make others think he's a weak person.’(China.com.cn,2009). In addition, Psychological studies give more supports for this conclusion. It found that on average, women cry two to five times a month, or three to five times more often than men, according to research reported by Nyklicek et al. (2004). In conclusion, the fact that female respondents like crying may be just a form of emotional expression. Consequently, the results do not really help investigate female international students’ ability to adapt to a UK university life.

On the question of cooking for themselves, however, figure 1 represents results that seem to contradict the hypothesis, and differ from the previous research of Helen (2012). This chart indicates that the equal amounts of international students in each variable think it is not difficult to cook for themselves. It seems that female international students are no worse off than male international students on the issue of cooking for themselves. This result may be explained by the fact that the majority of respondents are Chinese international students. In traditional Chinese culture, there is a traditional saying "women taking care of the family, men in charge of socializing". Therefore, in a number of Chinese families, women are more likely to cook, and women can cook better. However, in contemporary society, the idea of equality between men and women is deeply rooted in the young men and women. Thus, in modern society, men also take on some housework, an increasing number of men could cook, men's cooking ability has improved a lot than before. As a result, survey data displayed that 70% of male international students think cooking is not a difficult task, this is the same as female international students’ survey results. In conclusion, on the issue of cooking for themselves it is not clear (as the hypothesis states) that there are differences in the adaptability of male international students and female international students.

Conclusion

The aim of this investigation was to assess whether female international students are more likely to find difficulties adapting to UK University life than male international students. From the research, it can be concluded that there are certain differences in adaptability between male international students and female international students. Especially in terms of social, the male respondents' results show that male international students are more willing to communicate with the local people, and have more native friends than female international students. But in the aspect