The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 40, No. 2 & Volume 41, No. 1 - 35

Impact of Being a Resident Assistant

ODC in the present study ranged from .83 at
the pretest to .86 at the posttest.

Socially responsible leadership. We assessed this outcome with the 68-item revised
version II of the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (SRLS) (Tyree, 1998). The internal
consistency reliabilities of the SRLS ranged
from .72 at the pretest to .89 at the posttest.
The SRLS measures the eight dimensions of
the Social Change Model of leadership development through eight corresponding scales:
(a) consciousness of self (awareness of the values,
attitudes, and beliefs that motivate one to take
action); (b) congruence (thinking, feeling, and behaving with consistency, authenticity, and honesty
toward others); (c) commitment (intensity and
duration in relation to a person, idea, or activity-
the passion that propels one to act);
(d) collaboration (working with others in a
common effort); (e) common purpose (working
with others within a shared set of values);
(f) controversy with civility (recognizing that
differences of viewpoint are inevitable and valuable and that such differences must be aired
openly and with respect); (g) citizenship (believing in a process whereby a person or group is
responsibly connected to the environment and
the community); and (h) change (adapting to
continuously evolving environments and situations, while maintaining the primary functions
of the group) (Dugan, 2006; Higher Education
Research Institute [HERI], 1996). The SRLS
was speciﬁcally developed to measure leadership in college students.
The various scales of the SRLS have been
shown to differentiate between involved and
non-involved undergraduate students in community service, student organizations, formal
leadership programs, and positional leader-

ship roles (Dugan, 2006). Additional research
by Rubin (2000) demonstrated that undergraduates who were identiﬁed as emerging
student leaders tended to score signiﬁcantly
higher on the SRLS congruency, collaboration,
common purpose, citizenship, and change
scales than did a control group of students not
identiﬁed as emerging leaders.

Independent Variable
The independent variable of interest in this
study was the position as an RA. We collected
information on this variable using the Wabash
Student Experiences Survey that all students
completed in the spring of 2010. This item
asked if students served as an RA during their
time at college (coded as 1 = served as a resident
assistant; 0 = did not serve as a resident assistant).
Approximately 11.7% of students (n = 237) in
the sample reported serving as an RA during
college.

Control Variables
A particular methodological strength of the
WNS is its longitudinal pretest-posttest design,
which permitted us to introduce a wide range
of statistical controls for demographic and precollege characteristics (e.g., sex, race/ethnicity,
parental education, ACT or SAT equivalent,
high school involvement in extracurricular
activities and community service, pre-college
academic motivation, pre-college political
views, institutional type, and, perhaps most
important, a parallel pretest of each dependent measure). We also employed statistical
controls for other experiences that students
may engage in during college that tend to
be associated with educational outcomes; in
particular, we controlled for experiences such
as participation in collegiate athletics, living

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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
