Support usability, institutional trust, and psychological adaptation among international students from war-affected regions in Chinese universities: a mixed-methods study

Conflict-driven mobility is reshaping international higher education and raising new questions about how universities support students whose learning trajectories have been disrupted by war, political violence, or prolonged instability. Although international student adaptation has been widely examined through the lenses of cross-cultural adjustment, academic integration, and social support, less is known about how students from war-affected regions psychologically experience formal university support as visible, usable, trustworthy, and safe. This gap matters because support services may formally exist yet remain unused when students fear stigma, unclear procedures, confidentiality risks, or adverse institutional consequences. Here, we examined support usability, institutional trust, and psychological adaptation among international students from war-affected regions in Chinese universities through an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. The qualitative phase included semi-structured interviews with 28 international students and 12 university staff members across five universities, together with analysis of 15 institutional documents. The second phase used the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) with 15 experts to evaluate the relative priority of support factors derived from the qualitative findings rather than to test causal relationships among student-level variables. Organizational support received the highest criterion-layer priority weight (0.382), followed by institutional trust (0.275), organizational socialization (0.223), and psychological safety (0.120). At the indicator level, timeliness of response ranked first (0.124), followed by perceived institutional trust (0.117), fairness of management systems (0.102), and availability of ongoing guidance (0.102). Qualitative findings further suggested that institutional trust may help explain formal help-seeking reluctance, organizational socialization can be interpreted as a continuous reparative process, and co-national peer networks may provide emotional shelter while also amplifying anxiety. Taken together, the qualitative findings and expert-derived priority rankings suggest that psychological adaptation among students from war-affected regions may be supported not only by the formal availability of university services but also by whether support is psychologically experienced as recognizable, approachable, trustworthy, and safe to use. By shifting attention from support provision to support usability, this study extends perceived organizational support theory and offers evidence-informed implications for designing trauma-sensitive, student-centered support systems in international higher education.