For more than four decades, issues pertaining to the development of
intercultural relationships between international and domestic students
in university settings have received scholarly attention. However, there
appears to be lack of research exploring the extent to, and the manner
in which the individual and environmental dimensions interact with one
another to co-create this development. This review addresses this gap by
scrutinising English-language refereed journal articles from an
ecological and person-in-context perspective. The review, involving a
constructionist thematic analysis of systematically searched and
screened papers, identified the few empirical studies from that
perspective, the vague operationalisation of intercultural relationship
development, and the methodological limitations of the empirical work.
It also generated content-related themes of the individual–environmental
interactions in the development of intercultural relationships. The
review concludes by suggesting multiple areas of inquiry that warrant
further empirical investigations, and by calling for the amplification
and refinement of the research methodologies.