Social spatial structure and psychological mechanisms of seat-occupying behavior in university libraries-based on grounded theory analysis.

Occupying seats in university libraries is a situated practice shaped by the interaction of resource availability, environmental-psychological needs, institutional rules, and student responses under academic pressure. To reveal the underlying social logic of its emergence, grounded theory was employed to conduct coding analysis on 496 analyzable units derived from heterogeneous documentary, public-discourse, visual, and observational sources, and a multidimensional theoretical model of the social spatial structure of seat occupancy in university libraries was constructed. The analysis suggests that the limited availability of seating resources and students' psychological needs for spatial stability, personal space, and privacy may jointly contribute to seat-occupying practices, while design features, task requirements, and individual preferences may shape which seats become desirable. In the complex governance of management and technology, students may adopt strategic, affective, and territorial responses that can be reinforced through feedback processes and may contribute to the alienation of spatial functions and the dissipation of public resources, which the proposed interpretive model summarizes as a possible process of "resource scarcity-power conflict-spatial alienation" and feedback. The construction of this model aims to provide theoretical references for libraries to optimize psychologically informed management practices, curb seat occupying behavior, and enhance resource utilization efficiency.