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.
Conclusion
In order to boost IUPUI’s housing satisfaction rate, our team researched modern pairing methods and conflict resolution strategies for IUPUI to implement in their pairing process.
Our three recommendations found through after 10 weeks of research are as follows:
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Pair roommates based on personality similarities using the Myer-Briggs test.
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Keep roommates anonymous until move in day.
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Administer a conflict management course for roommates to complete.
These methods have shown to be effective at many well known universities and are supported through our primary research as well as other peer-reviewed articles and studies. Through the implementation of these practices, IUPUI will have a higher roommate satisfaction rate, which also results in a higher overall retention rate.