Welcome to the Roommate Study

About The Roommate Study

The grand purpose of this research project is to bring light to a gap in the discipline of

sociology. At the intersection of family sociology, urban theory, demographics,

political economy, and history, there sits an apartment of highly-educated

single adults whose views, tastes and work shape the world we live in, and

they are a black box to us. We plan to learn everything about them.

About The Roommate Study

This project aims to answer the following questions: What does it mean that the history of urban housing is also a story

of shared intimate quarters among strangers? How do such arrangements

affect the political, economic and social fate of a city? Does the erasure of

roommate households in sociology make for a poorer understanding of urban

transformation? How can cities be better designed and governed to account

for roommate households?

WHAT WE NEED

We need participants to share their experience of living in a home with non-relatives. This is an ethnographic project which involves observation and interviews. If you're interested in participating please sign up!

Fill out this qualtrics form to sign up and you will be contacted quickly! If you are selected, you will receive a payment of $25 for a remote 1 hour interview.

IF YOU ARE SELECTED

I will ask you to take part in an ethnographic interview of around 1-to-2 hours, wherein we talk about your history of having roommates, how you’ve experienced sharing households with non-relatives, and what thoughts you might have generally, about people living together in adulthood. I also plan to observe people as they live in their homes. I would like to observe 1-2 hours of a typical evening at home with roommates, or a weekend day. I will simply sit somewhere (with a mask on) and watch and take notes as they go about their business.



Fill out this qualtrics form to sign up and you will be contacted quickly! If you are selected, you will receive a payment of $25 for a remote 1 hour interview.

INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATION

The Roommate Study is a masters' thesis project in the Sociology Department of the University of Chicago. The study has been approved by the IRB, and the protocol number is 9IRB22-0057.


MEET YOUR RESEARCHER

Siyanda (pronounced "see-yanda") is a writer, satirist and graduate student at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include: Historical Sociology, Computational Methods, Globalization, Political Sociology, Quantitative Methodology, Social Change, Social Studies of Knowledge, and Social Theory.