The purpose of this study was to determine trends and difficulties concerning student incident reports within the residence halls as they relate to the incident reporting system from the Department of Housing and Residential Life at a Southeastern Doctoral I Granting Institution. This study used the frequency distributions of each classified incident by month for the 1993-94 and 1994-95 academic years (n=773). Both the Pareto Analysis and Trend Analysis were used with the data. The Pareto Analysis is a bar graph which displays the frequency and importance of each classification. The principal behind the Pareto Analysis is to identify the few vital causes that often are attributed to most of an effect. Although the Pareto Analysis is a useful tool for quality improvement, it has the drawbacks of not being able to measure variation over time and not being able to measure trends. The results indicate that using both the Pareto and Trend Analysis detected trends and problems within the reporting system as well as detecting problems with the incident reporting process. (Contains 2 figures.)