This study also showed that the level of social support at home and at college helps decrease homesickness. Brewin et al. (1989) concluded that homesickness is predicted by "greater self-reported dependency" on others and also by higher expectations that many college freshmen experience homesickness. .
Another interesting aspect to their findings, was that female participants tended to show more confiding behavior than male participants. In a study that compared homesickness in sociotropic students, who are characterized by high levels of dependence on others, an excessive need to please others, and a vulnerability to clinical depression, to autonomous students, Beck et al. (2003) discovered that homesickness in sociotropic students manifested itself in higher attachment to home scores, whereas autonomous students scored higher in disliking the university as a component of homesickness. These three studies highlight specific issues in predicting homesickness: social anxiety and social support, dependency, expectations about homesickness, and attachment to home.
An important achievement in the field of homesickness research was the development of a specialized scale to measure homesickness directly. .
The Homesickness Questionnaire (HQ) was developed by Archer, Ireland, Amos, Broad, & Currid (1998). After studying the different ways homesickness has been measured in past research, the authors derived a 33-item questionnaire to measure homesickness primarily as a grief reaction to separation from home (Archer et al., 1998). Archer et al. (1998) found the HQ to have good internal consistency, with Cronbach's alpha coefficients of 0.85 and 0.83 for the dislike of university and attachment to home factors, respectively (Benn, L., Harvey, J.E., Gilbert, P., & Irons, C., 2005).
While past research has predominantly focused on the predictors and personality trait factors of homesickness, the question of how homesickness can be treated has not drawn much attention.