In international education the conventional wisdom, supported by research, is that more contact with a host culture yields better results for study abroad students. Such exposure to a foreign culture is seen as the "raison d'etre" for study abroad: the mechanism provoking students to challenge their ethnocentric notions and move toward a more inclusive worldview. However, the relationship between contact and outcomes is a bit more complicated. Some shorter-term programs seem be able to attain outcomes similar to or identical with longer-term programs. There may be different outcomes depending on both quantity and quality of contact. Many factors may account for this more nuanced connection between foreign culture exposure and positive outcomes, not the least of which are parallel, concurrent contacts with other home culture study abroad students, and continued contact with significant people in the student's home culture. This research attempts to explore the relationships between various types of cultural contact (host culture, American student peers, and home culture) and important aspects of the students' study abroad experience. It relates these various aspects of contact to precursors of, and readiness for, study abroad, to several outcomes of study abroad, and to psychological processes employed by students during their sojourn. The aim is to shed light on the impact of various forms of contact, and to suggest possible processes underlying differential contact. These underlying processes have implications for education abroad program design. (Contains 2 figures and 4 tables.)