The Psychological Environment of University Student Residences

While the "environment" is generally considered to be pervasive and extraordinarily powerful influence on behavior, the exact specification of environmental or situational variables has been relatively neglected and, with the exception of the work of Barker, empirical attempts to specify environmental variables have, until recently, been notably absent. In the last few years a number of investigations have focused on certain delimited environments. The method employed in the present study of university dormitories is logically similar to that used in the CCI, CUES, and the Ward Atmosphere Scale; this may be termed the perceptual approach. Students and staff are asked to describe the usual patterns of behavior in their living units and their perceptions of the house. While each person may perceive his environment in idiosyncratic ways, there is a point at which each individual's private world merges with that of others so that common interpretations of events tend to arise out of common experiences. It is this common consensual perception of the press of immediate environment which the University Residence Environment Scale (URES) was developed to
measure.