San Francisco State University Pilot Study
MKThink believes that student wellness on campus is directly influenced by the physical and programmatic attributes of residential housing typologies. After the successful presentation of “Dwelling Well on Campus: Correlating Student Housing Typologies with Measures of Physical, Mental and Emotional Wellness” at the 2006 Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) Pacific Regional Conference in March of 2006, MKThink teamed with senior seminar students from San Francisco State University for further research. The team conducted a study examining the correlations between the housing typology of student residences and student wellness and satisfaction metrics at a variety of on-campus residential facilities.
The process began with a face-to-face survey of a statistically relevant sample size of students living in traditional residence halls, apartment-style, and residential learning communities. The survey gathered student health and wellness information (e.g. illness rates, academic performance, accessibility to health services and insurance status, level of satisfaction with residence hall environment, dining options, and housing price), divided into five main topic areas: Housing, Health, Services & Activities, Demographics, and Personal Opinion.
Similarly, information was gathered regarding the physical attributes and programmatic aspects of each residential building, such as number of occupants per room/apartment, presence of themed communities, space allocation by type of use, square footage, etc. The next step was the segmentation of the survey results by housing typology and student profile, and later correlation of segmented findings against the housing typology variables or physical and programmatic attributes described above.
This study constitutes a pilot for a larger national study with potential implications for the design of wellness- oriented student residences on American college campuses. For this study to be fully effective and provide useful and substantial information to university administrators and campus planners, full cooperation from the school’s authorities and the establishment of an Ethic Board are necessary to obtain authorization to ask the private and sensitive questions required for this research.
An MKThink Research Publication
March 2006