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0 TERMS OF REFERENCE On 13th September 2011, Basirah Bt Abdullah, Clarencena bt Kadius, Nur Nadira bt Mohamad Jafar and Siti Fatimah bt Ngadiron from the Faculty of Business Management, major in Finance, were instructed by Madam Suchitra Nair, the report writing lecturer (BEL422) to write a report of the Homesickness among UiTM Shah Alam Business Faculty Students. The report which includes the background information, findings, conclusions and recommendations has to be submitted on 14th December 2011.

2.0 INTRODUCTION Page | 1

The word of homesick has always been referring to kids, without realizing their existence among the teenagers and adults. In the university lifestyle, many students have not realized the existence of homesickness within their self. An educational activity such as transition to university life is often looked upon as a positive among themselves. However, the changes that result can at times be stressful for the student, as he or she leaves existing sources of social support behind. By using the lifestyle of the students from Business Faculty, we can measure the level, investigate the reasons, define the effect and provide the ways to overcome homesickness. By doing this research, the students especially can use the facts or information gathered by this research to improve themselves to control their homesickness feeling. This research will be conducted in Business Faculty student where all the students from this faculty will be respondent in order to gather the information. About 100 students will participate in this research. 2.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY The word of homesick has always been referring to kids, without realizing their existence among the teenagers and adults. In the university lifestyle, many students have not realized the existence of homesickness within their self. An educational activity such as transition to university life is often looked upon as a positive among themselves. However, the changes that result can at times be stressful for the student, as he or she leaves existing sources of social support behind. Homesickness can be measure through the university student behavior in daily lifestyle. In order to gathers information about homesickness among the university students, this research had been conducted to analyze the number of students who will be affected by homesickness and this research can give some overview about homesickness among the university students.

2.2 PROBLEM STATEMENT

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The word of homesick has always been referring to kids, without realizing their existence among the teenagers and adults. In the university lifestyle, many students have not realized the existence of homesickness within their self. An educational activity such as transition to university life is often looked upon as a positive among themselves. However, the changes that result can at times be stressful for the student, as he or she leaves existing sources of social support behind. Some researcher have categorize homesick in five factors. They are missing family, missing friends, feeling lonely, adjustment problems, and home ruminations. Being far from home environment can be stressful experience, especially for youngsters, although many students do not express their homesickness. Homesickness can be measure through the university student behavior in daily lifestyle. In this situation, homesickness can be defined by measuring their feelings. By asking their feeling honestly, we can make a research by defining the size of feeling homesick by the students in Business Faculty located in UITM, Shah Alam. The other issues that been created is to overcome homesickness among the Business Faculty student. Appropriately, the ways to overcome homesickness can measure the best treatment to cure this illness among the student themselves. By doing this, many researcher can describe the best ways to overcome homesickness. Because of this factor, researchers want to investigate the effect of feeling homesick to the student life. Using this reason, the researcher can classified the effect of the homesickness whether they are dangerous or not to the student themselves. Whether they will cause a bad influence to the student whey they are studying. To put in a nut shell, the researcher can investigate the right effect of homesickness among the Business Faculty student themselves. 2.3 PURPOSE OF THE STUDY The purpose of our project is to measure the level of homesickness among students of FBM in their daily life style and to find out the reason for students to feel this feeling. Besides that, we also will investigate the effect of homesickness within the FBM students and also to find out how to overcome the feeling of homesickness 2.3.1 OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY This research consist four main objective Page | 3

To measure the level of homesickness among the FBM students. To study the reason FBM students feel homesickness. To investigate the effect of homesickness among the FBM students. To identify the ways to overcome homesickness among the FBM students.

2.3.2 RESEARCH QUESTION Researcher need to consider the following question: How to measure the level of homesickness among the FBM students? Why do FBM students feel homesick? What are the impacts of the homesickness to FBM students academically, psychologically and physically? What are the ways to overcome homesickness among FBM students?

2.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY Hopefully this study will give a lot of benefits to the FBM students. This study is contributed to the knowledge of the researcher and to the students. There are some contributions of this study that bring beneficial to FBM students when it comes to the application of the research result. The significant of this study are divided into four parts which are including: The first contribution of this study is to help the researcher to measure the level of homesickness among the FBM students. This study provides some information about the level of homesickness. By knowing the true size of number, the researcher can record and create a strategy to describe about homesickness to the FBM students because homesickness is within us. Second contribution of this study is the students can applied the result of this study to know the reasons of their homesickness. Homesickness happens for a reason. However, sometimes they do not realize that they are homesick. Hence, when the students know the reasons of homesickness, they will know that they are already feeling homesick.

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Next, this study contributed to the effects of homesickness among FBM students. Once they know the effect they will analyze whether homesickness brings good or bad to them. Finally, the result may help the students to overcome their homesickness and stop missing too much to their parents, friends, or their hometown. The students could analyze the result and make up a conclusion and do some recommendations in order to overcome the homesickness. 2.5 SCOPE OF THE STUDY The scope of doing this research is among the FBM students themselves, where only Finance, Marketing, Insurance, Transport and Islamic Banking will be focuses. And every semester of each program will be taken as dependent variables to do the questionnaire. 2.6 METHODOLIGY 2.6.1 Primary Data

Primary data is a data which being originated by researcher for the purpose of a specific study. Primary data is the core information or data gathered direct from target respondent with specific purpose. For the purpose of this study, the primary data will be collected through: Questionnaire

A set of questionnaire will be design and distributed to the FBM students. The questionnaire will develop in English version. Moreover, the questionnaire was given to the respondent via printed questionnaire. This is the main method that used in order to gain some information regarding to the assessing the homesickness among FBM students. The structure of the questionnaire consists of: The questionnaire that designed consists of five sections. The sections are as follows: Section A: Demography Section B: Levels of homesickness Section C: Factors of homesickness Section D: Effects of homesickness Section E: Ways to Overcome of homesickness Page | 5

The respondents are collected from FBM students. It may take 10 15 minute to complete the questionnaire. 2.6.2 Secondary Data

Secondary data refer to the information gathered by someone other than that the researcher conducting the current study. There are several sources of data including books, website, journal, statistical abstracts, databases, media release and annual report of the companies. Journals

2.7 LIMITATION In the study that has been done, they were some research limitation has been used. Which is first, time constraints, where there is a lack of time to complete this research and not enough information can be obtained since the timeframe of the research is very short which only covers for five months period of time. Second is budget constraint. This research incurred higher cost which includes process of printing and other expenses in order to conduct a good research. Third is private information. Some of the personal information including the family background needed for the research cannot be accessed since they are private. And the last one is cooperation from the respondent. There is a lack of cooperation from the respondent of this research to share its information. It is difficult to gain 100% cooperation from the respondent. Therefore only limited primary data can be obtained for the purpose.

3.0 FINDINGS

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This section will present the findings from the various resources that were used. The findings are divided into five sections which are demographic distribution, level of homesickness, reasons for homesickness, effects of homesickness and ways to overcome homesickness.

3.1 DEMOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION The figure below shows the demographic distribution among FBM students.

Figure 3.1: Demographic Distribution Figure 3.1 shows majority of FBM respondents were female at 65% while 35% were male.

3.2 LEVEL OF HOMESICKNESS

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The figure below shows the frequency the respondents go back to their hometown due to homesickness.

Figure 3.2: Level of Homesickness Figure 3.2 represents the frequency of the homesickness among FBM students which shows how often they went home. Figure 3.2 shows that 23.1% of FBM students went home when needed, while 22.9% of FBM students went home every weekend. However, there are two frequencies with same percentage; went home once every month and went home during mid-semester break with 19%. 16% of the students went home during semester break. According to Fisher and Hood (1987), being far from home and family and familiar environment on the one hand and tackling the pressure of the new environment on the other hand, will affect individuals behavior and efficacy and result in homesickness. 3.3 REASONS FOR HOMESICKNESS The figure below shows the reasons for homesickness among FBM students. Page | 8

Figure 3.3: Reasons for Homesickness Figure 3.3 shows the reasons for homesickness by FBM students. There were five reasons for homesickness which included parents told to do so, do not have activities in college, do not have close friend in college, went home whenever faced a problem and missed the stuff at home. Based on the figure above, most of the FBM students will felt homesickness when they did not have activities in college which stood at 23.30%. While, 23.10% felt homesick because they missed the stuff at home. Next is 19.40% of them went home because their parents told them to go home. 18.90% went home whenever they faced a problem. Not having close friend is the least of reasons for homesickness which stood at 15.20%. According to research conducted by Kazantzis and Flett (1998 family cohesion and dependency were significant predictors of the occurrence of homesickness.

3.4 EFFECTS OF HOMESICKNESS Page | 9

The figure below shows the effects of homesickness among FBM students.

Figure 3.4: Effect of Homesickness Figure 3.4 represents the effects of being homesick by FBM students. The effects were divided into three sections which are, effects on their academic performance, effects on their psychology and physical effects. Academic effects consisted of cannot finish homework, cannot focus on my studies, and became stressed. While psychological effect consisted of miss my cats meowing for food and cannot concentrate on life. Physical effect consisted of having difficulty in sleeping, and crying frequently in shower. According to figure 3.4, academic effects stood at 46.36%. While psychological effects were 27.27%. Lastly, physical effects represented 26.41%. Stroeb, van Vliet, Hewstone & Wills (2002) stated that homesickness negatively impacts the academic performance of college students.

3.5 WAYS TO OVERCOME HOMESICKNESS This section below shows the suggested ways to overcome homesickness among FBM students. Page | 10

Figure 3.5: Ways to Overcome Homesickness Figure 3.5 represents the suggestions of ways the FBM students overcome homesickness. There were several ways to overcome homesickness which includes seeing a counselor, by calling parents, participating in university activities, talking to friends, and by enjoying life in college. Based on the figure 3.6 above, at 24.35%, FBM students overcame their homesickness by calling their parents. 22.87% said they could overcome homesickness by enjoy their life in college. Next, 21.56% FBM students overcame their homesickness by talking to friends. 21.26% showed that by participating in university activities they can overcome their homesickness. The least way used by FBM students to overcome their homesickness was by seeing a counselor with 10.38%.

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4.0 CONCLUSION The following conclusions can be drawn from the report: 4.1 It can be concluded that majority of the respondents was female. 4.2 The report also indicates that the majority of FBM students went home when needed. 4.3 The finding also explains that majority of FBM students felt homesick when they did not have activities in college.

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4.4 The results of the report reveal that homesickness had a negative impact on the academic performance of FBM students. 4.5 The findings of the report also show that the majority of FBM students overcame their homesickness by calling their parents.

Recommendations 1. The FBM students should properly manage their time so that they have time to go home. 2. The Faculty of Business Management should organize more events that involved students so that the students can participate and do not feel homesick. 3. The lecturers should give more assignments to the students so that the students are occupied and as a result they can improve their academic performance. 4. Parents should call their children at least once a week so that their children do not feel homesick.

References Fisher S, Hood B. (1987) The stress of transition of university: A longitual study of psychological disturbance, absent-mindedness and vulnerability to homesickness. 87, 425-41. Kazantzis, N., & Flett, R. (1998). Family cohesion and age as determinants of homesickness in university students. Social Behavior and Personality, 26 (2), 195-202. Stroebe, M., van Vliet., T., Hewstone, M., & Willis, H. (2002). Homesickness among students in two cultures: antecedents and consequences. British Journal of Psychology, 93, 147-168. Page | 13

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