This 88-page study presents data from a representative survey of 1,765 full time college students at 4-year colleges in the United States about their use of personal study rooms provided by academic libraries for individual students. The report presents highly detailed data on student awareness of the availability of such rooms, their incidence and frequency of use, and their evaluation of the importance of and quality of the rooms provided.
Data is broken out by more than 20 institutional and personal variables including but not limited to: income of family of origin, race/ethnicity, religion, gender, regional origins, current employment status, sexual orientation, major field of study, age, year of school standing, type of college, size of college, tuition level of college, and many other variables.
Just a few of the study’s many findings are:
-
Students who grew up outside of the USA were somewhat less likely than others to be aware of the availability of this service
-
46.34% of students studying biology, physics, chemistry and other hard sciences have used a personal study room in the academic library.
-
First year students used the personal study rooms more often than students in other years of class standing.
-
Students at larger colleges valued personal study rooms more than did those from smaller colleges.