The Effect of Penn State’s Roommate Selection Options on Friendship

Introduction:

In 2013, Penn State saw a 1.6% increase in student enrollment. This year, Penn State’s University Park gained 46,184 new incoming students. Our research looks into the incoming freshmen class and the options they are given in order to choose a roommate.

These options include random selection, in which the university will randomly assign people to live together; Facebook, where students can search on their own for roommates, or students may choose friends from home to live with. We wanted to study the effect of each of these options and see how each one affected the roommate’s friendship. Does living with someone from home automatically mean that the friendship will continue to grow, or does it cause more problems? Similarly, does a random roommate assignment have a negative effect on the students’ friendship, or if not, what are the benefits?

We wanted to research this question because we thought that it would benefit those students who were going to have to go through the roommate selection process. We wanted to further research which selection option was the most successful when it came to becoming friends with the roommate.

Literature Review

Our literature review consisted of six scholarly articles that were studies done on students who were going into college. The first article that we found focused on how important communication is when it comes to making friends. McEwan & Guerrero (2010) talked about the benefits of communication before getting to know someone. We based our questions off of this article regarding communication in order to find out about roommate interactions.

Another article that was important for our research by Canavello & Crocker (2010) also helped us create qu...

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...oommate there is no right answer.

Works Cited

Canevello, A., & Crocker, J. (2010). Creating good relationships: Responsiveness, relationship quality, and interpersonal goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(1), 78-106.doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0018186

Lai, Y. (2011). Facebook and impressions of new roommates in the transition to college: The impact of discrepancies between online and offline roommate impressions on the development of roommate relationships among first year students.ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, , 168. Retrieved fromhttp://search.proquest.com/docview/874638710?accountid=13158.

McEwan, B., & Guerrero, L. K. (2010). Freshmen Engagement Through Communication: Predicting Friendship Formation Strategies and Perceived Availability of Network Resources From Communication Skills.Communication Studies, 61(4), 445-463.