Students' Perceptions of the College Milieu

Abstract

In order to examine perceptions of the social environment, 109 college undergraduates rated the similarity of all nonredundant pairs of 30 representative social situations. An additional 70 subjects rated each situation on 38 bipolar scales descriptive of the situation's perceived properties and the subject's typical behavior and affect in that situation. A nonmetric multidimensional scaling solution in four dimensions provided an optimal fit to the similarity data. The dimensions were interpreted as Interpersonal Intimacy, Group vs. Individual Activity, Social Isolation, and Behavioral Conformity. The findings are discussed in terms of their relationship to previous investigations of the perception of social episodes and their implications for person-situation interaction research.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

1. Kruskal, J. B. , Young, F. W. , & Seery, J. B. How to use KYST, a very flexible program to do multidimensional scaling and unfolding. Unpublished paper, Bell Laboratories, 1973.

Bowers, K. S. Situationism in psychology: An analysis and a critique . Psychological Review, 1973, 80, 307-336.

Endler, N. S. , & D. Magnusson (Eds.) Interactional psychology and personality. New York: Wiley, 1976.

Forgas, J. P. The perception of social episodes: Categorical and dimensional representations of two different social milieus . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1976, 34, 199-209.

Hartshorne, H. , & May, M. A. Studies in deceit. New York: Macmillan, 1928.

Kaiser, H.F. The varimax criterion for analytic rotation in factor analysis . Psychometrika, 1958, 23, 187-200.

Magnusson, D. An analysis of situational dimensions . Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1971, 32, 851-867.

Mehrabian, A. , & Russell, J. A. An approach to environmental psychology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974.

Mischel, W. Personality and assessment. New York: Wiley, 1968.

10.

Osgood, C. D. , Suci, G. J. , & Tannenbaum, P. H. The measurement of meaning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957.

11.

Pervin, L. A. Performance and satisfaction as a function of individual-environment fit . Psychological Bulletin, 1968, 69, 56-68.

12.

Pervin, L. A. A free-response description approach to the analysis of person-situation interaction . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1976, 34, 465-474.

13.

Rosenberg, S. , & Sedlak, A. Structural representations of perceived personality trait relationships. In R. N. Shepard , A. K. Romney , & S. B. Nerlove (Eds.), Multidimensional scaling (Vol. 2). New York: Seminar, 1972.

14.

Shepard, R. N. Introduction to Volume 1. In R. N. Shepard , A. K. Romney , & S. B. Nerlove (Eds.), Multidimensional scaling (Vol. 1). New York: Seminar, 1972.

15.

Wish, M. Comparisons among multidimensional structures of interpersonal relations . Multivariate Behavioral Research, 1976, 1I, 297-324.

16.

Wish, M. , Deutsch, M. , & Kaplan, S. J. Perceived dimensions of interpersonal relations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1976, 33, 409-420.