4.1. Literature Review

Loneliness in university students has been widely observed in academic research (Bauer & Rokach, 2012; Ozdemir & Tuncay, 2008). Ozdemir and Tuncay (2008) conducted a study of 721 university students where 60.2% of the participants claimed to be “clinically lonely” with 81% of the participants identifying “social interaction” as an essential need during their university education. Prezza et al. (2001) found a relation between loneliness and a sense of community, which is defined as “a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together”. College students who are involved in fraternities and sororities, for example, are known to have a greater sense of community (Lounsbury & DeNeui, 1996), and thus predicted to be less lonely. 

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Despite the importance of instilling a sense of community in universities and the increasing use of technology in education, there is a lack of research in linking the two. Many studies focus on discussing mobile apps, instructional technology, and social media for learning and classroom purposes (Wai et al., 2016; Wagler, 2015; Baird & Fisher, 2005). However, there is currently no work exploring how technology can be used to improve the sense of community within university campuses or the student body.

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A form of a hyperlocal social platform is proposed to foster this sense of community among university students. Hyperlocal social platforms aim to “emphasize their focus on bounded geographical communities” (Lopez & Farzan, 2015), and a user study conducted by Hu et al. (2013) revealed that community members found it easier to get relevant information through a hyperlocal platform which aggregated local information from Twitter in one page. To inform how such a system might be designed, a review of literature on the design of social media apps was conducted. In the book Irresistible Apps, Lewis (2014) lists several social patterns, features that are defined to “offer (users) a chance to interact with others”: activity stream, broadcast, contact list, identifiable community, identity shaping, and item sharing. These patterns, however, need to be used wisely and according to the specific target audience of the technology. Kietzmann et al. (2011) also lays out seven building blocks of social media: identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation and groups. 

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This study proposes the use of a social media-like directory of student organizations in the form of a mobile app, which will act as a hyperlocal social platform where users can interact with the student body and find communities to join. I will explore how this app can be designed to improve a student’s perceived sense of community in their college campus, with an emphasis on exploring its features and functionalities. The features and building blocks discussed above will be user tested to learn what students value most in an app such as this. This research will propose a novel way of using technology in higher education that is not related to learning, yet arguably just as important, and hopefully encourage further development and studies in this direction. 

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4.1. Previous Work Review

To currently find information about available student organizations and find communities to join and interact with, there are four options available to students of UCLA: