Possessing skills in social and intercultural interaction is vitally important for employees who work in globalized environments, especially as people's working lives tend to involve an increasingly large amount of service-related activities. As a consequence, universities offer cultural studies courses and strive to enable their students to study abroad for a period of time. However, there is still no widely shared agreement on how intercultural experiences and cultural preparation courses predict the perception, thinking and acting of individuals. Therefore, the study at hand uses a cross-sectional design with N = 430 participants in order to investigate whether students of cultural studies gain more intercultural competencies during the time spent studying abroad, compared to studies of other subjects. The results reveal that students of cultural subjects show significantly higher levels of cultural empathy and openness in the post hoc measurement, even though there was no interaction effect with the amount of time spent studying abroad. Length of stay abroad had a significant indirect effect on social competence via all the dimensions of the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire. Moreover, results indicate that flexibility to adapt one's behaviour to cultural norms may predict problems when returning to one's home country.

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跨文化和社交技能？具有跨文化和社会能力的不同院系学生在国外逗留的关系

拥有社会和跨文化互动的技能对于在全球化环境中工作的员工至关重要，特别是因为人们的工作生活往往涉及越来越多的与服务相关的活动。因此，大学开设文化研究课程，并努力使学生能够在国外学习一段时间。然而，对于跨文化体验和文化准备课程如何预测个人的感知、思维和行为，仍然没有广泛的共识。因此，手头的研究使用具有N的横截面设计 = 430 名参与者，以调查与其他学科的研究相比，文化研究的学生在出国留学期间是否获得了更多的跨文化能力。结果表明，文化学科的学生在事后测量中表现出显着更高的文化同理心和开放性，尽管与出国留学时间没有交互作用。通过多元文化人格问卷的所有维度，在国外逗留的时间对社会能力有显着的间接影响。此外，结果表明，使自己的行为适应文化规范的灵活性可以预测返回本国时出现的问题。