The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 40, No. 2 & Volume 41, No. 1 - 19

Privacy Acquisition Strategies of Roommates

roommate did not appear to be leaving any time
soon?" Thirty-one percent of the participants
answered yes to this question. There were no
gender differences for responses to either question one, F(1, 162) = 0.72, p > .05, or question
two, F(1, 162) = 0.35, p > .05. The data indicate
there is an acknowledged need for privacy that
at least half of the students living in college
residence halls in this sample were addressing before the need actually arose. In addition,
almost one-third reported being faced with
this issue at some point during their shared
living experience.
Some students used privacy acquisition
strategies negotiated prior to expression of the
need for privacy, and others used strategies
that were spontaneous. Two sets of responses
were analyzed: privacy acquisition strategies
negotiated prior to expression of the need for
privacy and those strategies that were spontaneous. Some roommates reported never
having the need to discuss or request privacy.
Therefore, there were three categories of responses: previously arranged, spontaneous,
and non-strategies. Frequency of use for each
strategy is presented in Table 2.

Previously Arranged Strategies
The participants in this study identiﬁed several
privacy acquisition strategies negotiated prior
to expression of the need for privacy. Many of
these strategies involved mutual acknowledgement of the need for privacy and were the most
frequent in the sample, representing 53% of
the total reported strategies. Speciﬁcally, these
fell into the following three categories.

Conventional symbols. Conventionally
agreed upon signs or symbols that indicated
a desire for privacy made up about 3% of the

Table 2
Frequency of Use of Privacy Strategies
Privacy strategy

Previously arranged

Frequency (% of sample)

165 (53%)

Conventional symbols

11 (3%)

Argot

58 (19%)

Direct request

96 (31%)

Spontaneous

79 (26%)

Indirect public

49 (16%)

Direct public

30 (10%)

Non-strategies
Total

65 (21%)
309 (100%)

strategies reported. Examples of indirect conventional symbols include "If he is with his
girlfriend, the door is usually locked," "Generally speaking, we agreed that when the door to
our room was locked and we knew the other
was in there, you should not go in and give
them privacy," and "If one of us is going to
be with a 'signiﬁcant other' or date, we always
tell each other just to write on the wipe board
on the door when to come back later."

Argot. Argot, deﬁned as "a private vocabulary peculiar to a co-culture or group"
(Samovar, Porter, & McDaniel, 2010, p. 228),
was involved in 19% of the strategies. In the
current study this was expressed through the
use of symbols, unique to the roommates,
that are displayed on a door or through arbitrary verbal or nonverbal prompts, making

The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 40, No. 2 & Volume 41, No. 1

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 40, No. 2 & Volume 41, No. 1