Assessing the Role of Privacy in Developing Place Attachment in Student Dormitories

Each year students move to the town where their university is located. Leaving one’s parental home disrupts place attachment, described as the affective bond or link between one individual and a specific place and/or the people living in that place. In other words, because students move away from their parents, their friends and their hometown, their bonds with these people and their hometown are disrupted. Although this movement disrupts place attachment to their hometown and home, but moving to a new city provides an opportunity for new students to develop new attachments. Students, after accommodation in student dormitories on the one hand achieve a new experience in communications and interaction with other people and on the other hand, they expect that student dormitory to be such as home and looking for privacy and their private range and personal area. So the satisfaction of student dormitory largely affected by place territory and attainment of desired privacy. Literature review has suggested the existence of a relationship between people privacy experience and their place attachment. Therefore, the current study focuses on the achievement of optimum privacy could affect place attachment. In this regard, in the theoretical section, definitions and different perspectives on the concept of privacy and place attachment are reviewed and then extracted factors which is affecting on both. So, the mechanisms of formation of privacy are investigated and conditions of place attachment in student dormitory are assessed, by the survey which consists of open and closed questions. As well as, three student dormitories of Shiraz University such Rodaki, Velayat and Shahid-Dastgheyb were selected as case studies. The tools used in data collection included library studies, observation and questionnaire. After gathering data, the data have been investigated by utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods. The quantitative analysis, ANOVA analysis of variance, correlation and regression T test was used by SPSS software; and in qualitative part, content analysis method to study interviews was conducted. The result shows that level of place attachment is affected by the quality of achieving optimum privacy in a student dormitory. At the same time, research suggests that person-environment congruence, or the fit between the environment and the person, could be important indetermining privacy needs. If students believe that there is a match between the environment and the student _density of rooms, adequacy of facilities, flexible environment_ then they have a chance to regulate privacy successfully. It means that when environment provide the appropriate conditions (the fit between the environment and the person) to bring the optimal privacy for the individual, he or she attaches to that environment. If they didn’t achieve desired privacy they will attempt to change the environment and show behavior of regulating privacy. When students are successful in regulating privacy, they achieve privacy function and this allows students to achieve goals and therefore they are more able to developing place attachment. In other words, people who are successful at regulating privacy are more likely to develop place attachment and place attachment can contribute to well-being.