Study Abroad and Student Decision Making in Times of COVID: A Mixed Methods Study

The impacts of COVID-19 on Study abroad (SA) are deep and widespread and potentially affect the factors that guide US undergraduate students' choices as they relate to SA. To investigate them, the present study relies on the MSA (Motivation to SA questionnaire: Anderson & Lawton, 2015) and adds two new groups of factors: language learning and health. To observe changes in the relative weight of factors before and during the pandemic, responses to two different versions of the MSA from 83 students who had participated in SA prior to the pandemic were compared. Results from statistical analyses show stability in the ranking of importance of factors pre- and during pandemic, except for health-related factors, which come second after world enlightenment. In addition, interviews show that while students view "immersive" SA as a significant experience for its contribution to their personal and intellectual development, they do not consider virtual SA a real SA experience.