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Measuring the Leadership Effectiveness of Resident Assistants
Student affairs work is inherently interdisciplinary,
combining elements of education, psychology,
management, and statistics.
residential life programs, there is an expectation that campus residents anonymously
evaluate the performance of their resident assistants at least once a year.
Because of the increased resources and complexity of the role, it is surprising that
research on the evaluation of resident assistant performance has decreased rather than
increased. This lack of knowledge inhibits the abilities of residence life professionals to
understand the impact of these crucial student leaders (Manata et al., 2017). The available
measures of resident assistant effectiveness are outdated, known to be ineffective,
or are not psychometrically valid and reliable. Although it may be common practice for
individual residence life departments to develop their own systems of evaluation or to
outsource to for-profit companies, there is a need for more valid and reliable instruments
that are based on appropriate theoretical models that residence life professionals
can utilize for evaluating resident assistant performance and developing student
leadership skills.
METHODS
This study utilized a post-positivist epistemology, which is concerned with the discovery
of truth through testing, experimentation, and examination of cause-and-effect relationships;
broadly stated, post-positivism is the belief that " truth is already out there,
in existence, without our meaning-making " (Sriram, 2017, p. 23). The goal of the study
was to develop and validate a survey instrument for evaluating the effectiveness of
resident assistants from the perspective of their residents. The study used a nonexperimental
research design focused on survey research.
Population, Sample, and Participants
The study's population comprises on-campus residents at 4-year research universities
who live in a residence hall staffed by undergraduate student staff, commonly referred
to as resident assistants or RAs. To study this population, samples were collected by
partnering with the housing and residence life offices of two large universities in the
Southwest-one private research university and one public research university-that
administered the instrument to student residents. The instrument was issued to residents
in a selection of halls at the two institutions provided by the respective housing
departments as representative of their on-campus populations. The survey was sent
to a total population of 2,774 students. Of the total, 651 participants responded to the
survey, yielding a response rate of 23.5%. The response sample represents a wide variety
of student demographics across year, race/ethnicity, gender, international student
status, transfer student status, time spent living on campus, and community type. A
summary of these demographic results can be found in Table 1 (see page 44).
Volume 51, No. 1 * 2024 43

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