D ATA   C OLLECTION

Existing materials drove the data collection for this study. It began by collecting information related to the process of internationalisation and academic student exchange of the University of Costa Rica. The data was collected mainly from the Rector’s Annual Labour Informs 2005-2010, focusing on the section related to the Office of International Affairs and External Cooperation (OAICE), as well as its website.

General information about academic exchange policies, and strategies was retrieved during this process.

Once the primary information for the theoretical background was collected, the questionnaire was created. With it, information on intercultural communication competence needs was recovered. The information was recovered using a self-administrated questionnaire.

The process of data collection was carried out through the Internet. An email with the link to access the web-based questionnaire was sent to the participants.

It was necessary to ask OAICE’s legal adviser the best way to handle the contact with the participants. This was the case due to the delicacy of the contact information treatment. At the end, the agreement was to make contact through the personal of the International Affairs Office. They handled the dispatch of the questionnaire, and the answers were accessed directly through the Survey Monkey website.

This method allowed the respondents to have “more privacy and self-disclousure as no interviewer is directly involved in the question-answer process”. (De Leeuw, 2008: 323) Through this, and the use of complete anonymity, it was sought obtaining open responses without the biases brought by fear of retaliation after giving an opinion.

The designed questionnaire had 23 questions in total. It included both close-ended and open-ended questions. (See Appendix 1) In certain occasions, respondents were instructed to “answer by choosing from some number of alternatives” (McIntyre, 2005: 158), while in others there were no suggested answers, so respondents answered in their own words. (McIntyre, 2005)

The instrument was divided into three sections. The first one was the agreement declaration, which respondents had to answer in order to continue with the next sections. The second section was named

“experiences and opinions”. It had 18 questions, both open-ended and close-ended. The questions looked forward to obtain the information that would respond the research questions of the study. The final section named “general information” had 5 questions (both open-ended and close-ended) about period of study abroad, home country and university, gender, and respondents relation with the University of Costa Rica.

The questionnaire had English and Spanish versions. For this, a translation was needed. A close translation was used. It tried “to

remain close to the semantic import, the vocabulary, and the structure of the source text but also to meet target language requirements regarding vocabulary, idiom, and sentence structure”. (Harkness et al., 2010: 120) This strategy was used not just for the translation of the questionnaire, but also for the translation of the answers.

Due to resource limitations, a double translation was not utilized, nor were external translators used in evaluating the accuracy of translation. While this if often required of questionnaires with several language versions, in this particular case it was decided that the open nature of the study did not require full uniformity from answers to different versions.

The questions in each language were the same, as well as the order. In both cases, depending on the answers of the participants, some questions were skipped during the answer process. Therefore, the amount of questions to answer varied from participant to participant.

The questionnaire was created, and sent to be reviewed by two specialists in evaluation. They presented their recommendations, and changes were made in order to fulfil their requirements. The instruments were sent for a pre-test to eight different students, which are not part of the target group. The students were from Russia, Germany, Finland, Colombia, Spain, and Costa Rica.

After receiving the feedback from the students, and their answers, new changes were made. When all the corrections were done, the questionnaires were sent to a contact person in OAICE for a final review. Once it was approved, the instrument was sent to the student mobility area of OAICE for its distribution.

Students who participated in an academic exchange during the years 2007 – 2011 constituted the study population. The amount of students who constituted the population was 1323 from which 283 are Costa Ricans, and 1040 are from other countries. The sample was made by convenience, “selecting sampling units on the basis of availability”

(McIntyre, 2005: 105) of their e-mails. The questionnaire was sent to 520

e-mail addresses, for a sample of 39% of the population. There is not a precise amount of how many of the e-mails were received. Despite of this, the response rate was of 27%.

The questionnaire was sent out two times, with three weeks of time in between. The second time constituted a follow-up notice asking “respondents to complete […] their questionnaires” (McIntyre, 2005:

170). The amount of time dedicated to collect data with the questionnaires was of 6 weeks. In total, 173 questionnaires were started in the online service. Out of these, 142 were fully answered (122 in Spanish, and 20 in English).