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 #2 Anonymous Pairing
We sought to know how keeping roommates anonymous until move-in day would increase the students’ housing satisfaction. We found this method was helpful for several reasons: it prevents “Facebook stalking”, reduces early judgments, and increases perceived similarity.
With the ever-increasing popularity of social media, there is a tendency to want to look up your roommate before move-in day. It is the natural inclination to want to find out everything about them, and what you can expect in the next year. But by doing so, students’ judge the person based on their hobbies, friends, pictures, etc. without ever meeting them. They tend to form preconceived notions about how the person will act or what their faults are, and then put up barriers towards this person or move-in with the expectation that their roommate relationship is never going to work. But this method prevents “Facebook stalking” because if people don’t know who they are rooming with, they cannot look them up. Coming into college with a negative attitude only strains the potential relationship, but this can be alleviated by not giving students the opportunity to find each other online.
Because this method prevents students from looking each other up on social media, their only interactions are face-to-face. This limits the students from judging each other before they really get to know them. According to Whitmore and Dunsmore, successful roommates start with the partners feeling they are similar to each other, and can build trust between one another. The art of communicating is essential to getting to know another person, and researchers found that regular communication is key to building and maintaining a successful roommate relationship (Lease and Skillman, 2017).
The anonymous roommate strategy has been implemented at Stanford University. They boast a 98% freshman retention rate (U.S. News, 2019) and attribute their success to anonymous roommates. Kate Chesley, a writer for Stanford News, says this, “That long-standing tradition admittedly causes some confusion, given the inevitable arrival of two microwaves, two refrigerators and two differently colored floor rugs. But the practice has the advantage of allowing students to meet one another with no preconceived notions and on an equal footing. That becomes especially important when so much information is available online,” (Chesley, 2017). Because a student’s roommate experience is such an important factor relating to their overall college satisfaction, starting off on the right foot can set the tone for the rest of the school year and potentially for the four years that one spends in college.
This means that with a simple change in IUPUI’s rooming process, you can increase students’ housing and roommate satisfaction if you follow this best practice between orientation and move-in time.
Keeping roommates anonymous until move-in day was tested as a hypothetical situation at IUPUI within the local study to see how students would react. 100 of the 101 students who took the survey responded to the question (Fig. 2). The question was phrased as a multiple choice question with four response options to make the student choose either a more positive or negative answer, not in between. The question evoked a variety of responses, most of which were spread out across the spectrum of like and dislike. Only 5% of the sample would have been on board, but the rest of the 95% were equally divided between dealing with it and hating it.
A question directed at this scenario was included in the local study because Stanford received some negative feedback after they implemented this system. Students and their parents were frustrated over the lack of ability to coordinate with a roommate about shared items like a microwave, mini fridge, rug, etc. This has not stopped Stanford from using this method, and IUPUI should adopt the same mentality.
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Figure 2.1 shows 100 students’ responses to the question, “How would you feel if your roommate had been anonymous until move-in day?”