Explaining factors affecting the formation of sociable spaces in educational environments using factor analysis method: (Case study of academic spaces)

As a scientific-cultural society, educational-academic space is one of the most important spaces which influences social interactions and possesses its own specific relations and norms. It is because the formation and dynamism of social interactions among students depend on many individual and environmental factors, with the current article aiming to find the most important environmental factors affecting the formation of social interactions in academic environments.

Using factor analysis method, this research has tried to explain the factors affecting the formation of social interactions in educational environments. The scope of the study includes three randomly chosen spaces of the University of Tehran, Iran University of Science and Technology and Alzahra University. This study has used SPSS22 in order to analyze data for summarizing variables and independent factors with R and orthogonal factor analysis methods.

The findings show that six factors have an effect on the formation of social interactions in academic environments, which include furniture, comfort and physiological comfort and convenience; security and territory; sports and entrance space; shared open and closed public space; architectural form and pattern; and possibility of face-to-face proximity.

The results indicate that the factor of furniture, comfort and physiological comfort and convenience is the most vital effective factor affecting the formation of social interactions among university students and the parameter of the kind of space coloring is the most important index with a factor loading of 0.745.