Relationships between density, crowding, privacy and dormitory satisfaction : the case of Bilkent University dormitories

Many students move to different cities for their university education. This brings formidable experiences to those who are separated from their family. Living in a dormitory teaches them to live, interact and coordinate with other students in common spaces. This study focuses on the relationship of satisfaction with crowding and privacy. A questionnaire that inquired about the satisfaction of students with respect to their dormitories was conducted with 200 undergraduate students who lived in Bilkent University Dormitories. Factor analysis, correlation, ttests, chi-square tests, and anova were used to test the hypotheses. In line with the literature, the results suggest that general satisfaction level, dormitory satisfaction level, dormitory room satisfaction level and satisfaction of school level show positive and strong correlations with each other. Men seem to have a higher general satisfaction level but less privacy compared to women in smilar conditions. Individuals who live with more people per meter square in a dormitory room feel more crowding than the others. Amongst different genders that lived in the same room, women perceived and qualified their room as smaller compared to men’s perception. Lastly, individuals who qualify their dormitory room as small seemed to feel more crowding compared to others.