Sidney L. Werkman’s research while affiliated with University of Colorado and other places

This study attempts to define distinctive attitudes and character traits found in American teenagers who have lived overseas in different locations for a considerable period of their lives. Such adolescents offer an extreme example of the risks and stresses of geographic relocation. Through the use of the Semantic Differential Technique and a sentence completion questionnaire, we compared the overseas adolescents with a group of high school students in the United States, matched with the overseas group for age, sex, socioeconomic status, and marital status of parents. Our findings suggest that the extent of geographic mobility, overseas residence, and sex significantly affect adolescent attitudes and personality patterns. The mobile overseas group reported less positive self concepts, greater insecurity about the future, less comfort and reliance on the support of interpersonal relationships, and less positive affect states.

The task of readapting to the United States after living overseas is, for many, the most difficult hurdle in the cycle of international life. People who have lived overseas emphatically report that it is far less stressful to leave the United States and find a place in a new country than it is to experience the unexpected jolt of coming back home. As a 20-year-old woman recalled: “People pushed and shoved you in the New York subways; they treated you as if you simply don’t exist. I hated everyone and everything I saw here and had to tell myself over and over again: ‘Whoa, this is your country; it is what you are part of.’”