The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 2 - 15

Development, Validity, and Reliability of the Campus Residential Experience Survey

vital ways and should be considered as important as human and fiscal resources (Strange &
Banning, 2015).
In summary, student learning is further facilitated on college campuses by encouraging
students to live on campus, engaging residence
life professionals as educators, inviting faculty
to be out-of-class teachers, and designing facilities to promote learning outside the classroom.
The perceptions of student affairs professionals
and other administrators regarding residential
life have a dramatic influence on what facilities
to build, who to place in the residence, and how
to conduct day-to-day operations (Shushok,
Scales, Sriram, & Kidd, 2011). The assumptions
underlying a particular campus's residence
life operations, as well as the whole division
of student affairs, affect a variety of important
student outcomes (Hirt, 2006). Moreover,
these perceptions determine where to place the
most emphasis: utilizing student affairs professionals, incorporating faculty, or redesigning
facilities to better promote learning. This study
discusses the development and validation of an
instrument that unearths administrator perceptions in these important areas.

based approach to validity in which validity
is "established by the combined strength of
theory and evidence that supports a particular
interpretation of a measure, given the context
in which it is used" (Porter, 2011, p. 47). Therefore, we examined both theory and statistics in
determining the quality of the instrument.

Participants
The population of interest for this study consisted of residence life professionals - student
affairs administrators with a vested interest in
the residential experience of college students.
For our sample, we used the Association of
College and University Housing Officers-International (ACUHO-I), the largest professional
association devoted to the housing experience
of college students. We surveyed the membership of ACUHO-I to better understand administrative perspectives of residential education
at colleges and universities across the nation.
We distributed the survey to 9,753 members
and we received 1,486 responses, resulting in
a response rate of 15.2%. Our analytic sample
has 1,275 participants, reduced to 1,143 participants for the specific research question ad-

METHODOLOGY
To address the gap in research literature concerning what administrators believe about the
campus residential experience, we attempted
to measure administrator perceptions of different facets of residential life in a valid and
reliable manner. Utilizing exploratory factor
analysis and Cronbach's alpha, validity and reliability were fundamental considerations in the
development of our instrument: the Campus
Residential Experience Survey. As described
below, we used Kane's (1992, 2001) argument-

The perceptions of student
affairs professionals and other
administrators regarding residential
life have a dramatic influence on
what facilities to build, who to
place in the residence, and how to
conduct day-to-day operations.
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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 2

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 2