Aneeqa Mazhar (M.Phil 2012)
Supervisor: Dr. Iram Fatima
The current study aimed to find out how satisfaction with the environment in hostel students is related to different dimensions of adjustment: health adjustment, social adjustment, academic adjustment, and overall adjustment of hostel students. It was hypothesized that satisfaction with the hostel environment would be positively related to all the adjustment dimensions in hostel students taking into account family relations, emotional maturity, visits to home per month, duration of living in hostel and last GPA scored. Data was collected from 230 female hostel students from two hostels of public sector universities. Family Relations subscale (Bhatia & Chadha, 1983), Emotional Maturity Scale (Singh & Bhargav, 1990) and Adjustment Inventory for College Students (Sinha & Singh, 1971) were translated in Urdu for use in present study. A scale of Satisfaction with the Hostel Environment was developed. Before running the main analysis psychometric properties of the scales were assessed and all the scales were found to be reliable. Principal component analysis was used to assess the factor structure of the newly developed scale. Single factor solution was retained for Satisfaction with the Hostel Environment Scale. Pearson product moment correlation and hierarchical regression analyses were used to test hypotheses of the study. The analyses revealed that satisfaction with the hostel environment strongly predicted social, academic and overall adjustment. However, contrary to the expectations, satisfaction with the hostel environment did not predict health adjustment. Moreover, emotional maturity and family relations consistently predicted all adjustment dimensions as well as overall adjustment. The findings suggest that satisfaction with the hostel environment plays positive role in adjustment of hostel students. The findings of this work have important implications for parents, hostel administrators, students and researchers.
Key words: hostel environment, adjustment, emotional maturity, family relations.
