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Increasing college students’ exposure to global contexts and improving their intercultural competency remain challenging educational objectives, especially at the community college level. Fortunately, the recent shift in higher education from study abroad opportunities toward so-called “internationalization at home” initiatives, where students interact with people from cultures outside their own while remaining on their home campuses, offers new options. In this article, we describe a virtual exchange activity that we conducted between our sociology courses at a community college in the United States and two universities in Japan. We show through our assessment of the students’ experiences that a well-coordinated, carefully crafted, technology-enhanced internationalization at home activity has the potential to offer important global learning opportunities and intercultural competency development for sociology students who may otherwise lack the means to participate in study abroad.

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Marital quality is a dynamic concept, as the nature and quality of people's relationships change over time. There have been two major approaches to conceptualizing and measuring marital quality: looking at the relationship itself (examining patterns of interaction, such as the amount and type of conflict) and looking at individual feelings of the people in the relationship (evaluative judgments of happiness or satisfaction). Marital quality and related concepts – adjustment, happiness, and satisfaction – are the most frequently studied variables in marital research. Despite the wealth of literature examining these constructs, there is a continuing lack of consensus among marital researchers on how to conceptualize and measure marital quality, as well as an absence of a unifying theoretical approach to studying this construct.