Where the heart is: home space transitions for residential college students

ABSTRACT

Home and the transition to adulthood are related temporal and spatial constructs. Building upon Kenyon’s [1999. “A home from home: Students’ transitional experience of home.” In Ideal homes? Social change and domestic life, edited by T. Chapman, 84–95. New York: Routledge] categorization of physical, social, personal, and temporal elements of home for college students, we analyze survey responses from 256 students at a 4-year U.S. residential college in order to uncover how perceptions of home-like spaces change as students move from pre-college homes, through on- and off-campus home spaces, and toward imagined future homes. Our quantitative findings show that the four home elements matter differently across time and type of home, supported by qualitative findings wherein students articulate how they conceptualize similarities and differences between the different home spaces. This study adds to ongoing conceptualizations of the transition to adulthood as placed (for four-year residential college students especially), and as fluid and multilayered in terms of social actors’ views of their past, present, and imagined future homes and accompanying identity transitions.

KEYWORDS:

• Emerging adulthood
• college student development
• home
• space and place
• residence halls
• higher education

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the research assistance of Neal Christopherson, Alvaro Santana-Acuña, and Wally Herbranson.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The final column in each table specifies paired time period means that were statistically significantly different at the p < .05 level. In other words, the significant differences in each home element across time period can be explained by rises and falls in the specific means when time periods are compared as a series of pairs. Since more mean pairs showed significant differences than not, only paired means that are not significantly different – that is, that are statistically significantly similar – are noted in order to save space in the tables.