Prioritization of Private Space Factors based on Experts and Users Opinions in Universities' Learning Environments

Abstract

Non-attention to users’ needs can insert physiological and mental harms to them, so environmental psychological knowledge can be used to help and promote quality of academic environments. According to the researches, there are main problems in academic spaces such as lack of private spaces and not having sense of belonging in students. Hence, this research tries to notice “personal space” conception which is one of mentioned meanings in environmental psychology and studies effective factors on “academic spaces”. Therefore, based on theories review and under experts’ ideas were extracted effective factors as: physical, mental, personal, and social factors in desirability of private spaces. The methodology of this paper consists of a quantitative and qualitative approach to hypothesis testing. For data collection written resources and half-structured interview by experts of this field were used, which was first analyzed by content analysis method and then classified. Then in order to clarifying importance of elements it was used the survey research. The survey method has been adopted to study the key objective of the research and to assess the level of correlation between variables. The sampling population of this study consisted mainly of experts and specialists groups. The sample size was determined through statistical methods. In order to assess the individual's point of view, In-depth interviews were done with experts and specialists in the field of study. Questionnaires have been distributed among targeted respondents. By using factor analysis, main factors were identified and prioritized. Comparison of the results from the experts and users questionnaire shows that about the important effective factors they have the same opinions but in priorities of physical and mental factors they have different ideas.