Showcase of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors (SOURCE)

Far From Home: Consumption and Personalization in College Dorms

For many traditional college students, their campus is the first “home” they will ever choose for themselves. Their dormitories or residence halls are the first spaces they will ever personalize as young adults. This paper examines those personalization processes, and the resulting navigations of institutional control, identity, and reconceptualization of home within the college student population. Data were collected through eight interviews and dormitory tours conducted with full-time campus residents at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The resulting analyses examined the systematic process of personalizing a dorm room, and how that process is affected by the institution and issues around privacy as a university student. The broader implications of this paper lie in its understanding of how the future generation of homemakers construct identity, and how future consumer values become transmittable elements as college becomes a necessity and a commodity all its own. This research was limited because data came from the student body of only one university; future research should be conducted with additional universities to strengthen the validity of this study.