interpretative phenomenological study of effective individual interventions by live-in residence life professionals

Abstract

Conducting informal individual interventions with students is a professional expectation for residence life professionals in higher education who live in campus residence halls. Despite this expectation there is limited understanding about what constitutes an effective individual intervention, especially from the perspective of the person conducting the intervention, and how these experiences affect them. Studies of interventions in higher education that affect first-year students have traditionally only examined the retention effects of formal group activities such as new student orientation, first-year seminars, and residing in living/learning communities, as well as single instance individual counseling or substance abuse interventions. This interpretative phenomenological study focused on the perspectives, background, and practices that inform residence life professionals who have conducted effective individual interventions with first-year students. The results of this study found that residence life professionals made sense of the effective informal interventions they conducted through the care they showed to students and the values brought to the interventions, and through the values brought and the personal impacts that they felt.