1.1. Factors motivating people to travel abroad

SStays abroad for professional or educational purposes, whether short or long, are becoming a part of the life experience of an increasing number of working and studying people across the world. From a personal perspective, a long stay abroad is usually a turning point in life. Recent research on such sojourns broadened our knowledge concerning factors that motivate such decisions. Apart from improving language skills, these motives include the desire to make friends, establish relationships or build rapport (Coleman, 2013), get to know oneself in a broad sense, as well as develop the traveller’s identity in terms of religion, work or sex (Isabelli-García, Bown, Plews and Dewey, 2018). From this perspective, a stay abroad is seen as a potentially critical life experience (Isabelli-García et al., 2018) that may lead to opening new opportunities, including these to learn or use language.

Several positive factors may motivate a person to go abroad. Of these, the acquisition of language skills (British Council, 2015) comes to the fore, along with the possibility of an increased employability and opening new career prospects (cf King, Findlay and Ahrens, 2010; Deakin, 2014). Mark Teng divided the motives of people leaving their countries into two groups. Some invest time and money to go abroad to acquire “symbolic resources (e.g. language, education, friendship) and material resources (e.g. capital goods, real estate, money)” (Teng, 2019, p. 44). Others make a decision to relocate for such reasons as expanding knowledge (King, Ruiz-Gelices, Findlay and Stam, 2004), general interest in a new culture (Van Mol and Timmerman, 2013), or gaining intercultural experiences and developing intercultural competences (Beerkens, Souto-Otero, Wit and Huisman, 2016; Gómez, Imhoff, Martín-Consuegra, Molina and Santos-Vijande, 2018; Sison and Brennan, 2012).

Some researchers propose that the reasons for the participation of young adults in exchanges should be treated as a separate category because it is most often this group of people that opt for a longer stay abroad and the factors that motivate them to do so can be significantly diverse. Young adults treat the foreign placement as some kind of rite of passage from childhood to adulthood – to experience something that can shape or expand their personal and linguistic understanding (cf. Xamaní, 2015). In contrast, Hannah Deakin (2014) pointed

to “personal drivers” which, though seemingly distant from purely educational or professional goals, include factors related to personal development. It may be the desire to enjoy oneself, the need to change the place of residence, or the search for new goals and experiences. These are all driven by the desire to explore, often combined with a socio-cultural development of the traveller (Gómez et al., 2018). Sometimes, the leitmotif of such a journey is an idealised image of the destination which makes some countries more preferable to others because of their greater attractiveness resulting from stereotypes or images perpetuated by the media.

Other researchers examining the factors underlying the decision to go abroad, especially to improve the knowledge of a foreign language, refer to the so-called consumer values (Gómez et al., 2018; Sheth, Newman and Gross, 1991). There are five types of consumption values: functional, emotional, social, epistemic and conditional. While together they can influence the final choice of destination or intention to travel, these values usually compete with each other in the decision-making process until one becomes predominant.

In most cases, people who decide to leave their country are guided by functional (utilitarian) values, e.g. geographical proximity, natural beauty of the destination, its diversity and quality of culinary art, historical legacy, infrastructure, and if applicable, also prestige. Emotional values often play a secondary role. When driven by a positive attitude towards the destination, prospective sojourners choose destinations that they consider worth visiting or those that provide fun and relaxation. In comparison, people who are guided by social values travel to make friends or simply meet others with similar interests. Those who travel to discover new places and learn new things, often to escape routine, are guided by epistemic values. Conditional values – the last item on the list – are usually attributed to objects, here destinations, and play a key role in this study. They are based on “perceived utility from a set of conditions that enhances functional alternatives; perceived utility from a set of conditions that enhances the functional or social value” (Gómez et al., 2018, p. 127). These values are therefore external – they are linked to the purpose of the travel and not to the traveller – and result from a better understanding of the object or destination in the process of individual reinterpretation of values. For example, some people may decide to visit a particular place because it seems geographically close. The longer they stay there, the more obvious it is for them that their place of stay is safe, its economy is stable, and it is easy to find employment there, which translates into high quality of life. In other words, they re-evaluate their motivation to stay in a given country due to specific conditional values.