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.
Recommendations
The recommendations in this report are based on information collected through internet-research and a local study. We have came up with three recommendations that we feel will benefit IUPUI Housing and Residence Life. Our main focus was to find ways to match roommates that promotes harmony and decreases students dissatisfaction.
Recommendation #1: Pair Roommates Based on Personality Similarities
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Incorporate a personality test into your pairing process
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Option 1: Incorporate the Myers-Briggs personality test
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Option 2: Incorporate the NEO-PI-R personality test to determine personality traits based on the Big Five Factor model of personality
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Option 3: Incorporate a questionnaire measuring degrees of independence and affection into your pairing process
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This could be independent or combined into one of the personality tests mentioned above
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Recommendation #2: Keep roommate assignments anonymous until move-in day
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Prevent students from looking each other up on social media
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Improve the students’ perceived similarity
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Recommendation #3: Administer a Conflict Management course to incoming students.
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Create a conflict management course for incoming students.
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Better prepare and prep RA’s for roommate conflict and problem solving situations.
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Improve the personal efficiency and compromising abilities of incoming students.