Early Research Challenges

One of the ideas I had for my research project was to look into the history of my house, which has been inhabited by RIT students for many years, and analyze what it could tell us about RIT student culture or perhaps college house culture in general. The issues I've run into in my early research is that this house has not (to my knowledge) been afflicted with many of the problematic tendencies of greek life houses at large universities, which have seen extensive prior research. In searching for peer-reviewed articles similar to the type of research I'd planned to do, the vast majority of the articles I've encountered are studies on the culture of binge drinking, hazing, and sexual assault in frat houses. It is difficult to find research related to the less sinister sides of college house culture.

I contacted our COLA librarian Cami Goldowitz asking for help refining my search terms to find more relevant articles, and that has helped me start to tend more in the right direction. Cami recommended me some search term improvements to help me find some more relevant results, as well as directed me towards some articles she found that are closer to what I am searching for in terms of the social culture of student housing. These have all been helping to direct me closer to what I am searching for, though I am not sure I have yet found prior research that matches exactly what I am planning to do. I am thinking of expanding my search to look more broadly for research on specific houses, not necessarily related to college student housing, and more into general student culture research, not necessarily about housing. Perhaps by looking at these separately, I can get a better idea of how to effectively combine them in abscense of a exact prior example.