Aging & Social Change: Fourteenth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

This study provides an exploratory analysis of the impact of mentoring on the adjustment of immigrant older adult care workers in Japan, contrasting it with expatriates’ experiences. Japan faces a pronounced demographic shift towards an older population, and despite having a long-term care insurance system, there is a significant shortage in the caregiving workforce. The need to increase the number of immigrant caregivers is evident; moreover, they often struggle with the complexities of integrating into Japanese culture, leading to early returns to their home countries. Human resource management research on foreign workers’ cross-cultural adjustment has largely focused on expatriates, raising questions about the applicability of these findings to immigrant older adult care workers in Japan. This study revisits the findings of Zhuang et al. (2013) to evaluate their applicability to immigrant older adult care workers. A two-year longitudinal survey is conducted among vocational school students in older adult care in Japan, with data collected at the following three points: matriculation, the end of first year, and graduation. The analysis, using a cross-lagged panel model, shows that the relationship between mentoring and cross-cultural adjustment for students differs from that for expatriates. Although previous research suggests that the career development functions of host-country mentors facilitate expatriate adjustment, this study finds no significant correlation with student adjustment. This suggests that factors aiding cross-cultural adjustment for immigrant care workers in Japan may differ from those for expatriates, with language skills and caregiving proficiency potentially influencing outcomes. Further studies are required to explore these factors.