how food and dining experiences impact the cultural adaptation of international students in the United States

Sources:

He, Rui, et al. “It’s more than just food: the role of food among Chinese international students’ acculturation experiences in the UK and USA.” Food, Culture, & Society, 2024, pp. 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2024.2330180.

The article investigates how food serves as a critical yet often overlooked element in the cultural adaptation of Chinese international students in the United Kingdom and the United States. This article directly connects to the proposed research topic by providing empirical evidence on how food functions as a powerful medium for cultural adaptation. The findings underscore that food is not merely about sustenance but is intricately linked to emotional well-being, social integration, and identity preservation.

Institute of International Education. (2021). Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange. “IIE Open Doors.” IIE Open Doors, opendoorsdata.org/. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.

It is a comprehensive annual report that provides detailed statistical data on international students studying in the United States. 

• With your overall project, you’re proposing a potential empirical study into your topic. This allows you to develop a pretty standard social science style paper (basically, one that follows the general structures of many of the academic articles you read; except it doesn’t include the analysis and discussion). To that end, as you’re still working on expanding your literature and working on your overall argumentation of what matters in general, you should also make sure you’re in the process of collecting your data and beginning the analytical portion of your paper.
• What your final draft will need in this portion of your paper
• A section explaining how and why interviews can address your topic
• An explanation of the population you’re focusing on: are they consumers? Are they manufacturers? Are they salespeople? Whoever your population is is fine, just need to make sure it’s clear where you’d be focusing and why this population works.
• What sorts of questions will be using (are there certain topics, things, items, etc.?)
• Size 12 Times New Roman font
• Minimum 13 pages of content (i.e. 13 pages minimum plus references)
• 1” margins all around
• Double-spaced
• A uniformly applied citation method (both in-text and in the references list)
  • You can use ASA, APA, MLA, etc.
  • Important note: the formatting of the paper should follow the guidelines noted at the top. There is no need for a cover page  or differing margins.
• A minimum of 14 resources
  • 12 of these resources must be from academic, peer-reviewed resources
  • 2 of these resources can come from a non-academic (though trustworthy) resource.  These are especially useful for your introduction 

To that end, the Final Paper contains the following, required items:

1. Introduction (~1-2 pages)
   
2. Literature Review (~8-10 pages)
   
3. Proposed Method (~2 pages)
   
4. Conclusion (~1 page)
   
5. Appendix with proposed interview questions
6. References (this section is not included in the 13 page minimum)

Each of these components break down as follows:

1. Introduction
   1. The introduction will serve to introduce the topic and idea to your audience. In this case, you need to construct an introduction that motivates an interest in the topic as well as introduces the basic necessities of understanding to your reader.  To that end, your introduction should focus primarily on your issue of interest (the pay gap, for example).
   2. Make sure there is a clear thesis of what your overall paper is as well as the research question you’re attempting to answer.
   3. It should give some insight into the components that underlie that issue (define it, give a bit of history on it, and also present basic statistics or background for it, which you can obtain through places like newspaper articles or research organizations like Pew).
      1. Remember: the introduction motivates the reader to want to know more, so it needs to stay focused on the issue that you want to address. If you have an annual review article, it can give you some great basic details for your introduction.
      2. As such, you should enter in with a specific claim or point.  Don’t go as broad as “Since the beginning of time.” One of the reasons this does not work as an opening is it is often historically inaccurate. Another is that it has become a cliché, which is not a strong way to open a paper. Rather, you want it to be something that is clear and direct.  “Determining why people buy what they buy has been a core concern of economic theorizing.”  Note the differences.  From there, you would want some general, broader points such as “Americans spend approximately ### billion dollars a year on grocery shopping” or something else that is tied into your specific claims and topic.  Obviously, make sure you cite these claims.  Working down in this fashion allows your introduction to go from your broader point/interest down into the specific manifestations of what you’ll be arguing, which your thesis will explicitly articulate.
2. Literature Review
   1. For your literature review, you must use a minimum of 12 peer-reviewed, academic research articles (plus the 2 non-academic but trustworthy sources). The literature review serves to fine tune your point further and helps you to focus on where you are most specifically interested, namely the key concepts, factors, and variables that you think influence the problem you are trying to understand.
   2. You need to work through your idea here about what you identify as happening. This works to take what you’re interested in and give insight into how it’s complex.  So, make sure your literature review discusses what influences you’re interested.
   3. For example, say you were interested in the voting behaviors of people. Your literature review would note what influences people to vote and why. So, you’d most likely have some discussion of how and why race influences voter preference, as well as some discussion of some things like gender, income, region, religion, etc.  That way your reader understands the complexity of the issue, but keep in mind your major focus. Do you have to talk about everything under the sun here? No, but you should make sure to address the major things that continually come up around your topic.
   4. For this section, you’re welcome to break it down into subsections.  For example, if you’re doing a study of food consumption patterns and the changing nature of diets being influenced by pop culture, you could have subsections regarding vegetarianism/veganism, gluten-free, paleo, etc.  (Or, if you’re more interested in how food trends are mediated by demographics, you could use subsections like Racial Variation in Food Consumption, Gendered Nature of Food Consumption, etc.)
      1. Notice how the above sections allow you to deal with a variety of information while implicitly helping you with flow: when you break things down into subsections, there should be logical consistency but a little break between them is okay (though still work to give and maintain flow).
3. Proposed Method
   1. You are completing a research proposal for this course. As such, this such has you detailing your proposed method (which in this course is centering upon interview methods, covered in Week 2).
   2. As some of you have not had a broad research methods course (or, have had one but it did not go into qualitative research), you’re using this paper to accomplish two things: see what it’s like applying literature to an empirical context of your choosing and building out a proposed method for something that would take longer than this course. Qualitative work often has a long lead time, something that a 10-week quarter is not super amenable to if you are asking certain questions or have particular topics. This section contains the following:
      1. A reiteration of your research question
      2. A description of the people you would interview (i.e. the proposed population). Who they are and why they are beneficial for addressing your research question
      3. Why interview methods are an especially fruitful method this topic (i.e. what their strengths are for eliciting insights).
         1. make sure you take the info from the lecture and the readings to substantiate and justify the choice: why is it strong/why does it work for your topic
      4. Information about what aspects your interview questions will cover.
         1. You are also writing the questions, but you’re placing that in the appendix. Here you are describing what you’re asking about and why.
4. Conclusion
   1. The conclusion reiterates your main research question and the points you’re expecting to address and why. Highlight how your research fits within and is useful for the broader area you’re arguing for. Additionally, note what you can’t address in this project but make sure you present how this gets us moving forward and basis for understanding and pursuing future research.
5. Appendix
   1. Here you will list your full set of proposed interview questions in their proposed order.
6. References
   1. In addition to using in-text citations, you must also have a references list. Use whichever citation method you want but it must be uniform!