Vaihto-opiskelijatypologia : Helsingin yliopiston opiskelijoiden vaihtoon lähdön motiivit ja kohdevalinta

There has been a lot of discussion on the exchange studies in the medias lately and the necessity of the exchange studies has been questioned. There has been some research on the topic but it has mainly focused on the experiences of exchange students. Exchange motivations and exchange studies as a part of tourism haven't been widely investigated. This paper aims to find out why university students decide to go on exchange and on what grounds do they choose the exchange destination. The purpose is to form a motivation based exchange student typology that characterizes different exchange student types and can also be applied outside the chosen target group of this study. Exchange motives were found out by sending an electronic questionnaire to the students of University of Helsinki who have done, are doing or are shortly going on exchange. In the questionnaire the students rated using 4-step Likert scale if they agreed or not with the proposed motivation statements. The motivation statements were formed by using the existing literature on motivation and exchange studies and by asking a group of exchange students of their motives. Altogether 291 acceptable answers were received. The information related to the respondent's exchange and background was statistically analysed. The motivational data collected with the questionnaire was clustered into seven classes based on the reasons for the exchange and the exchange destination choice. The results of the study show that in general the motivations for doing an exchange are more important than the motivations to choose a certain exchange destination. The most important reasons for going on exchange are experiencing new things and improving language skills. When choosing the exchange destination the most important reasons are similarly improving language skills and also the culture of the destination and traveling in the neighbouring areas. The study shows that the motives of exchange students vary and that students can be classified into separate exchange student types based on their exchange motives. The formed exchange student typology can with reservation be used also in other universities and internationally. In the future it would be useful to conduct a similar study with another target group and find out if the data could be classified into the exchange student typology formed in this study. In addition it would be interesting to take into consideration also the psychographic factors in the classification. All in all this paper shows that there is a need to investigate the exchange studies as a separate part of tourism.