The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 42, No. 2 - 65

Strengths-Based Approaches

Live-in professional staff had strengths-based
interactions with students as a part of ofﬁcial
department processes; for example, resident
directors held strengths-based conversations
with students who violated housing policies
during misconduct adjudication and helped
students develop plans to positively change
their behavior by leveraging their top ﬁve
talent themes.

METHODOLOGY
Procedures
At the end of their ﬁrst semester, all ﬁrst-year
students (N = 5,514) were invited to participate
in an online survey regarding their strengthsrelated interactions. We offered a lottery incentive for participants. In the survey, students
were asked to complete assessments of their
strengths-based interactions, perceptions about
the value of the strengths program, and their
engagement, among other areas. The institutional review board approved this study prior
to survey distribution.

Participants
The student response rate for the survey was
19.7% (n = 1,085). Of these students, 88% (n =
955) lived in the residence halls, and we used
this sub-sample in the present study. White
and female students were slightly overrepresented in the sub-sample when compared
with the general ﬁrst-year student population
(which was 50.7% female and 75.3% White).

Measures
Dependent variables. To answer our research question, we used two dependent
variables: ﬁrst-year students' engagement in
higher education and retention to the second
year of study. To measure students' engage-

ment, we used a 12-item assessment known
as the College Student Engagement Scale, an
instrument based on the Gallup Q12 (Harter,
Schmidt, Killham, & Agrawal, 2009) designed
to measure attitudinal outcomes and engagement. For these items, students rated their
agreement (scaled 1 = strongly disagree to 5 =
strongly agree) on a variety of items (e.g., "At
this school, I have the opportunity to do what I
do best every day"). We summed students' responses on all 12 items to develop an engagement score, and, in our sample, the average
academic engagement score was 46.61 (scaled
from 12 to 60, SD = 8.46). Close to 200 studies
have been published on the Student Engagement Scale (Lane & Chapman, 2011), and the
instrument has been shown to demonstrate
strong reliability (ʸ = .87) (Cantwell, 2005),
a ﬁnding also noted in this study (ʸ = .90).
Student retention data were provided by the
Ofﬁce of Institutional Research. In our sample,
93.7% were retained to their second year (n =
894), which is slightly higher than the average
rate for the entire ﬁrst-year class (90.4%).

Independent variables. Demographic characteristics were also provided by the institutional research ofﬁce. We dummy-coded sex and
race/ethnicity variables in the analysis of the
data (e.g., female = 1, male = 0; Hispanic = 1,
all other students = 0, etc.). We also controlled
for students' on-campus experiences, including their participation in a university honors
program and in Access to Success, a small
advising community aimed to increase the
retention of students from underrepresented
backgrounds (Soria, Lingren Clark, & Cofﬁn
Koch, 2013). We also included students' participation in elective freshman seminars
taught by faculty in a wide variety of disciV O L U M E 4 2 , NO. 2 * 2 0 1 6

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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 42, No. 2

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