College students' sense of belonging : dimensions and correlates
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Colleges and universities often have significantly different graduation rates based on students' ethnicity. Systematic variation in students' sense of belonging at college may be a factor. Existing literature suggests that a better understanding of student belonging at the college level can help to improve college outcomes, particularly for racial/ethnic minorities who are often underrepresented on college campuses and may benefit from well-designed systems of support to bolster their sense of belonging. This study was designed to improve our understanding of student belonging, its components, and its correlates for a diverse group of college students. Self-reported survey data were collected from 159 college sophomores (about a quarter of the class) from one small private and predominantly white college with graduation rates that varied by student ethnicity. Factor analysis produced three reliable and independent measures of belonging: social belonging, academic belonging, and perceived institutional support. Further investigation of this sample indicated that the general measures of college students' 'sense of belonging' found in the literature are mainly social in nature and therefore mask more nuanced associations with important variables that are revealed with separate measurement of academic belonging and perceived institutional support. Results from a set of multivariate stepwise regression analyses suggested that student demographics (ethnicity, parent education, and gender) jointly did not explain a significant amount of variance in any measure of student belonging. Rather, institutional and interpersonal variables (e.g., students' perception of the college's commitment to diversity, students' perception of the personal relevance of the curriculum) jointly explained a significant amount of variance in all three measures of belonging, suggesting that the strongest predictors of student belonging were not fixed student attributes but other variables that can be influenced to various extents by college policies and practices. Additional results indicated that social belonging and academic belonging were significantly and differentially associated with students' self-reported GPA, level of satisfaction with the institution, level of class participation, and frequency of meetings with professors outside of class time. The findings suggest that while social belonging has important associations with measures of academic performance and outcomes, academic belonging is also important and distinct. Differentiating the measurement of 'sense of belonging' into three components may be useful both for research and for guiding institutional policies and practices. It allows us to identify more precisely what facet of belonging is being measured, and how each is differentially associated with 'college experience' variables and educational outputs of interest.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Ingram, Dabney Chatwin |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Education. |
| Primary advisor | Stipek, Deborah J, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Stipek, Deborah J, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Antonio, Anthony Lising, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Hakuta, Kenji |
| Advisor | Antonio, Anthony Lising, 1966- |
| Advisor | Hakuta, Kenji |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Dabney Ingram. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Dabney Chatwin Ingram
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...