Proxemics and Stress: An Empirical Study of the Relationship Between Living Space and Roommate Turnover

Abstract

Drawing upon prior work in animal and human proxemics as a general stimulus for .this research, we confirmed the hypothesis that male university students sharing rooms with twinbeds choose new roommates significantly more often than students sharing rooms with bunkbeds. All rooms were the same size and were provided by the university with the same basic furnishings. The critical difference in the two types of rooms appears to lie in the relatively greater living space and visual privacy gained by students in rooms with bunkbeds, one above the other in relation to the loss of visual privacy and more restricted space available to students in rooms with single beds lined against two walls.