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The college roommate experience can be one of the most important aspects of a students' undergraduate experience. As colleges and universities across the country have seen a steady increase in enrollment over the past three decades, so has the demand for living on-campus. In recent years, concerns have arisen as to the benefit and value of these experiences especially considering the significant costs of higher education. As such, it becomes increasingly necessary for institutions of higher education to ensure that the on-campus living experience is positive and beneficial. One aspect of this experience is a student's relationship with his or her roommate. In the past, roommate selection was a largely random process controlled by the institution's office of housing. In recent years, new processes have been created that place more of the control in the hands of the student. The purpose of the present dissertation is to investigate one of these roommate matching programs, the RoomSync Roommate Matching Program. / Educational Leadership

Interpersonal trust reflects a vital component of all social relationships. Trust has been linked to a wide variety of individual and group outcomes in the literature, including personal satisfaction and motivation, willingness to take risks, and organizational success (Dirks & Ferrin, 2001; Pratt & Dirks, 2007; Simpson, 2007). In this dissertation I tested a new conceptual model evaluating the roles of attachment, propensity to trust, perceived similarity of trustee to self, and social exchange processes in trust development with randomly assigned, same-sex undergraduate roommates. Two hundred and fourteen first-year students (60% female, 85% Caucasian, mean age = 18) at a large south-eastern university completed self-report measures once per week during the first five weeks of the fall semester. Perceived similarity measured the second week of classes and social exchange measured three weeks later combined to provide the best prediction of participants' final trust scores. Attachment and propensity to trust, more distal predictors, did not have a significant relationship with trust. This study demonstrated that trust is strongly related to perceived similarity, as well as social exchange. A prime contribution of this study is the longitudinal, empirical test of a model of trust development in a new and meaningful relationship. Future work may build on this research design and these findings by focusing on early measurement of constructs, measuring dyads rather than individuals, and incorporating behavioral measures of trust. / Ph. D.