Case Study Debriefing Sarah's Experience In Her Host Family

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1. Debriefing Sarah’s experience in her host family would require Sarah to acknowledge her failure to adapt her new context. A) While mentioning she was vegetarian, she should have tried not to impose her difference, but to see how her specificities could have fit the context. Mexican culture avoids uncertainty, and therefore has highly rigid norms and belief. This implies that the family might not have understood the importance of vegetarianism, since it wasn’t part of the family practices. As the adaptation theory mentions, Sarah, being the only party with a goal to adapt, shouldn’t have expected the family to communicate their discontent, but rather use a person-centered-message to make her family understood what vegetarianism means. Perhaps…show more content…
If she would have been more self-aware, she could have change her expectations and integrate the family. For example, she could have proposed her host mother to help her prepare the meals. This would have been an opportunity to share her food culture background and to seek for New Mexican vegetarian meal, while showing respect to family life. B) These skills of being self and socially aware could have also leaded her to be more flexible and tolerant. When her host mom mentions to her she couldn’t bring her to the airport as it was planed, instead of taking it as an offend she could have try to converge her respond to create an open space where common ground can be achieve. It is important when expectations are not met to be aware that communication barriers can arise and to make sure to not succumb to them. In other words, to not react blindly to the situation, but to monitor oneself in order to make sure you control your presentation. Following this state of mind it would have position her as a listener, trying to seek for new information in order to understand why the mother decision
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