Executive Summary
The IUPUI Housing and Residence Life Department is interested in boosting their students’ roommate and overall housing satisfaction, as well as finding modern pairing methods and conflict resolution strategies that current and incoming students can use.
This report will benefit IUPUI’s HRL by giving our client and other coordinators recommendations on the best practices pre, during, and post roommate selection process. This also benefits the students who use on-campus housing because they are being paired using the best possible methods of roommate matching and have access to resources that equip them to deal with inevitable conflict during their university years.
The findings in this report are based on a local study conducted by the team of student consultants and online research conducted through academic sources. The local study was produced and the results were gathered using Qualtrics, a survey tool that generates analyses and graphs based on the respondents’ answers. The survey consisted of 10 questions, ranging from roommate conflict, personality tests, and anonymous pairing. The survey was sent out to current IUPUI students.
Online database research was collected using ProQuest Central and Academic Search Premier, leading multidisciplinary research databases whose access is paid for by IUPUI. Another tool used was Google Scholar, a free web search engine that searches for scholarly literature. The information gathered from this research helped shape our recommendations and gave rise to the focus and scope of the local study.
Analysis Part #1 Pairing Process
We sought to find the best way to pair college roommates that promotes harmony and increases students satisfaction. We found that it is most beneficial for colleges to use modern systems and incorporate a personality test in order to best pair college roommates.
For many college freshmen, living in a dormitory will be their first time to share a room. With countless potential differences, including personality, study habits, and lifestyle preferences, being matched with the right person can be critical to a positive university experience. For decades, universities believed that acclimating to the quirks of a complete stranger was an essential part of college but now many colleges have moved to more modern systems that assign roommates by using their responses to questions about various personal preferences, including neatness and messiness, musical preferences, and study habits.
A study conducted at Duke University sought to examine the correlations between predicting roommate satisfaction or compatibility and commonalities among potential roommates. After they analyzed their results, what they had were data that either didn’t agree with previous research or was not found to be statistically significant (Kaegebein, 1982, p. 49). What this means is that pairing based on common interests between college roommates, which still may be a minorly important factor, isn’t a good predictor of roommate satisfaction. It is common for colleges to pair roommates just based on this, but it usually yields mixed results. Something more should be done and implemented for a higher satisfaction rate.
In 1983, Davidson College added the Myers-Briggs personality test into their pairing process that has shown to be effective in increasing student satisfaction. The test recognizes each individual's personality type based on if they identify as an introvert or extrovert, how they approach information, how they make decisions, and how they deal with the outside world. According to Kurt C. Holmes, associate Dean of students and Director of the housing office at Davidson College, since Davison started using the Myers-Briggs personality test their retention rate has shot up to 96% (Ingalls, 2000). He believes that student satisfaction is predicated on how well they get along with a roommate. According to Introduction to Type and College, various colleges participated in a study that showed room changes had “decreased by 65% and residence hall damage by 35%” due to pairing roommates from the information provided by Myers-Briggs personality test results (Young, 2013).
This means that by adding the Myers-Briggs personality test into IUPUI’s roommate pairing process, there is a good chance of IUPUI having a higher retention rate and an increase in student satisfaction.
Stephen Reynolds, a Psychology researcher and professor at Azusa Pacific University, conducted a study to determine levels of roommate satisfaction in the form of roommates rooming together the following year, when compared to the Big Five Factor model of personality. These five factors being openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Each factor carries its own set of different facets that make it up. The measured levels of each for an individual were surveyed using the NEO-PI-R questionnaire. The group of students measured were all found to have similar results of personality, which alone states the impact personality has on many of the findings that were statistically significant. The biggest, most important factor in predicting the longevity of a roommate relationship was the Big Five domain Openness, it being more statistically significant than the other factors. (Reynolds, 2016, p. 52). One question in our survey asked participants if they had conflict with the differences in openness with the results shown in Figure 1. Nearly 22% experienced conflict with this factor alone. This response to our survey agrees with Reynolds’ study.
Figure 1.1 shows 101 students’ responses to the question, “Have differences in openness (to trying new things) been a point of conflict with your roommate?”
With this in mind, using a personality test such as the NEO-PI-R to predict roommate satisfaction would be a good idea, especially prioritizing openness over the other factors of the Big Five.
Lisa K. Hanasono published a study in The Journal of College Student Development that also address degrees of independence and affection through establishing a roommate typology. The three categories students were put in, conventional, functional, and separate, were determined based on a questionnaire. Roommates that had the same ideal type had higher overall roommate satisfaction. (Hanasono, 2012, p. 623-635) Through using an independent t-test, it was determined that their hypotheses for these tests were both statistically and practically significant (p<0.001 for both and for the correlational hypothesis between variables r>|0.5|). Upon completing our local study, Figure A1 indicates the responses we gathered. We listed four responses, split between if differences in openness does and does not cause conflict. That the participants have noticed, 22% said that it does cause conflict. This agrees with Hanasono’s research.
It would be beneficial for IUPUI to implement this kind of questionnaire to place rooming students into these categories. This could be done independently of other placement methods, or it can be incorporated in the decision-making process among other matching variables.
