The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 37, No. 2 - 93

College Housing Dissertations

One source of cutting edge research is doctoral dissertations . . . the research is conducted by professionals who have a strong commitment to residence halls, and after completing their doctoral studies they will likely become the future leaders within residence life and housing systems .
research on the topic of college and university housing?” was the primary research question for this study. The sub-questions of the study were based upon the meta-framework of Paterson et al. (2001) and consisted of the following questions: What were the methods/attributes of the research? What were the theories that guided the research? And finally what were the findings in terms of the dissertation topics?

than just using residence hall students as the sample for other topics unrelated to housing. This criterion reduced the sample to its final number of 47 dissertations.

Method of Analysis
Qualitative document analysis (Altheide et al., 2008) provided the methodological framework for the study. This approach is based on a qualitative content analysis that examines documents using an inductive strategy rather than the strict deductive coding typical of classical content analysis (Neuendorf, 2002). The specific approach to coding utilized in this study was template analysis, which uses both deductive and inductive codes (King, 1998). Deductive codes were utilized to examine the methods (author attributes, degrees, methods, and institutional settings). The inductive coding strategy of the constant comparative method (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) was used to examine the dissertations for theories, topics, and thematic structures.

Trustworthiness
Peer debriefing was used to insure the trustworthiness of the inductive coding process (Creswell, 2007). The selection of dissertations and the inductive thematic coding process represented a consensus between the two contributing authors.

METHODS/PROCEDuRES
Sample
The Proquest Digital Database search for dissertations completed within the past 5 years using the search concepts “housing,” “residential life, “college housing,” and “university housing” produced a total of 176 dissertations. By eliminating those that were not exclusively focused on college or university housing, a group of 98 dissertations was then identified. The final criterion was that the dissertation needed to address specific topics associated with college or university housing rather

FINDINGS
Method Results
The findings related to the methods question— about the attributes of the researcher and the doctoral research on housing programs within higher education—included the following. Using common gender names as a basis for

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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 37, No. 2

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