The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 42, No. 2 - 66

Krista M. Soria * Leonard Taylor, Jr.

plines. Given that these seminars tend to be
content-speciﬁc (e.g., economics, art history,
information technology) instead of being
an introductory course to college life, only
a few faculty incorporated strengths-related
discussions and activities. Additional controls included students' ﬁrst semester grade
point average (M = 3.31, SD = 0.56) and their
enrollment in one of seven colleges. Due to
smaller sample sizes in some of the colleges,
we combined enrollment in three colleges
(biology, agriculture, and engineering) and in
two other colleges (college of arts and sciences
and a college of design).

Strengths interactions. In the survey, we
asked students about their strengths interactions in housing and residence life (HRL);
speciﬁcally, we asked them to indicate whether
they had strengths interactions in general
programming or activities in HRL or with a
community advisor. Some students reported
having both types of interactions in HRL; consequently, we wanted to examine the effects of
having both types of interactions in our analysis, and so we created a third variable to reﬂect
students who had both interactions. All three
variables-general HRL programming only,
CA discussion only, and both general HRL programming and CA discussions-were dummy-coded with no interactions/discussions as
the common referent variable.
Given that students had other strengthsrelated discussions and interactions outside
of housing, we sought to control for those
types of interactions. In the survey, we asked
students to report the frequency of either oneto-one or group strengths discussions (scaled
1 = zero to 5 = more than 15), and we summed
the variable to reﬂect the total one-to-one or
66

group discussions that students had about
strengths. We also asked students to report the
frequency of strengths assignments they had
in classes and attendance in strengths workshops or trainings (both scaled 1 = zero to 5 =
more than 15). We also asked them to report the
frequency of their participation in class presentations given by themselves or other students
or class presentations given by faculty or staff.
We summed those two items to reﬂect the total
number of class presentations that students attended regardless of the presenter.
Finally, we were interested in controlling
for students' enthusiasm for the strengths
program. We asked them to rate whether
they believed strengths had value for them
now (scaled 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly
agree), whether strengths positively increased
their sense of belonging on campus (scaled 1 =
strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree), and what
proportion of strengths discussions they initiated on their own (scaled 1 = none to 5 = all).
(See Table 1.)

Data Analysis
We utilized hierarchical multiple regression to
examine the relationships between ﬁrst-year
students' strengths interactions in housing
and their engagement. Hierarchical multiple
regression analyses are commonly used by researchers seeking to examine the variance that
speciﬁc measures explain above and beyond
the variance accounted for by control measures (Petrocelli, 2003). We entered the independent and control measures in three blocks:
demographic variables; college experiences,
including academic major, participation in
honors or Access to Success, and fall semester
grade point average; and students' strengths-

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

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