ENHANCING COMMUNITY AT THE NEW SCHOOL
AT A GLANCE
BUSINESS PROBLEM:
The New School Housing & Residential Education department provides robust programming for its residents, including various events hosted by RA staff, amounting to about 1,800 community building initiatives across six halls in the 2019-2020 school year, serving 2,000 students and representing a $75,000 budget. As the University worked through a strategic plan assessment, the department was tasked with showing how its programming was contributing to a sense of community at the school.
MY ROLE & METHODS USED:
I was named by my Senior Director to be the Chair of our department Assessment Committee, leading a team of colleagues in a variety of applied research initiatives. For this community based goal, I also worked with three assistants who I trained to help enter data. I focused on two main research questions to gauge the impact of our programming:
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How can we better track student attendance at programming and use this information to determine areas of growth?
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I created the first ever Attendance Tracking Project, giving us clear information on who was attending what, including demographic and location data.
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With my oversight and training, three assistants mined raw attendance data and kept a running tracker of individual attendance, amounting to thousands of data points.
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At the end of the year, using SPSS, I conducted statistical analysis to determine trends including descriptive statistics, correlations, and T-tests.
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Is there a connection between attendance at residential programming and a sense of belonging and other positive outcomes?
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I created a survey asking residents a number of questions related to six positive relational outcomes, including their sense of community, the extent to which they have positive interactions with peers, and their sense of connection to the University.
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I conducted advanced statistical analysis including correlations, T-tests, and ANOVA on the results, illustrating a clear connection with attendance and all six positive outcomes.
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SELECTED OUTCOMES:
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Our Committee shared our findings with the University and they were satisfied with our progress in relation to the community building goals of the strategic plan.
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The Attendance Tracking Project provided a wealth of demographic data and showed where we were doing well and where we needed to improve at attracting students to attend programs.
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One major insight was that international students are statistically less likely to attend programming, prompting increased discussion around how this can be rectified.
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I presented this data to various stakeholders, from professional staff to front-line student workers.
challenge
The New School Housing Department engages in robust programming to help support out-of-classroom learning for its 2,000 resident students. With increased institutional pressure to increase student sense of community and belonging, this programming and its expense came under scrutiny. Does residential programming lead to increased sense of belonging? How can attendance be better tracked and improved upon for maximum return?
process
My research plan for this project involved both attitudinal and behavioral measures to learn more about the program's impact and ways to improve.
Sense of Belonging Survey
I created a nine question survey asking students whether they had attended a community meeting or a program / event and their feelings about community, institutional and residential belonging, and the quality of interactions with their peers.
Using advanced statistical analysis through SPSS, I found that attendance at programs / community meetings was positively correlated with all community-based outcomes, with attendees showing statistically significant differences in belonging, positive feelings about the school, quality of interaction with peers and other factors.
Attendance tracking project
The department tracked aggregate attendance for each of the hundreds of programs hosted across six residence halls. But it did not track individual attendance, necessary to identify demographic trends.
I created a demographic template and trained three assistants to manually track individual program attendance over the course of the academic year, amounting to almost 3,500 data points for 2,000 students. This allowed the department to examine attendance trends from the organizational level, to the building level,and all the way down to the residential floor level. For the first time it allowed the department to see the level of attendance based on a variety of demographics as well.
The Project provided a wealth of information about who was and was not attending events and receiving the community benefits shown above. Advanced statistical analysis was used to pick apart the data here. One important insight was that, across all units, international students were significantly less likely to attend events than their domestic peers.
OUTCOME
My findings were utilized to illustrate that the Housing Department was fulfilling their community building mandate, and used to justify the $75,000 programming budget.
I believe you should be a champion for your data! So I presented my findings to stakeholders across the organization, from management to front-line student programmers.
The data collected helped shape training plans and collective goals for increasing attendance now that we had a baseline.