Student preferences for university accommodation: An application of the stated preference approach

This chapter reviews studies about the attributes of dormitories and other student-type accommodation. It presents the methodological framework, and outlines the steps involved in the stated preference approach and a description of the fieldwork and the site where the study took place. The environment-behavior discipline research aims to measure students’ preferences for various accommodation attributes and to determine if preferences differ between types of students. The chapter utilizes a stated preference approach to obtain the measures, thus demonstrating a method that is not well known yet in the environment-behavior literature, but that has become quite popular in related fields such as transportation, housing and marketing. Studies have looked at student preferences for particular room attributes. More insight into students’ trade-offs between accommodation attributes could be helpful in the process of managing and designing student accommodation and in the development of optimal learning environments for students.