Belonging works better as connection across the student life course

By Student Voice AI

Updated Mar 14, 2026

At Student Voice AI, we see belonging problems most clearly in the language students use to describe where they feel connected, where they feel peripheral, and which institutional routines make participation easier or harder. That is why Julianne K. Viola, Luke McCrone, and Martyn Kingsbury's recent Studies in Higher Education paper, "Beyond belonging: connecting across the STEMM + B student life course", matters for UK universities using student feedback to improve the student experience. The paper argues that belonging is often treated too narrowly, and that universities learn more when they focus on how students connect across time, spaces, and communities.

Context and research question

Belonging now appears in student experience strategies, access plans, and survey dashboards across the UK sector. The risk is that it becomes a single headline measure, as though students either belong or they do not. That framing can flatten the everyday reality of university life, especially at institutions where students move between departments, accommodation, commuting patterns, societies, work, and family responsibilities.

Viola, McCrone, and Kingsbury ask a more useful question: what if belonging is better understood as a changing pattern of connection across the student life course? To answer it, they draw on a five-year longitudinal study at a specialist UK STEMM + B university, using 117 interviews with 48 participants between 2019 and 2024. Their abductive thematic analysis traces how connection strengthens, weakens, or changes direction as students move from pre-arrival into undergraduate, postgraduate, and alumni stages.

Key findings

The first finding is that belonging is dynamic, contextual, and individual, not a fixed state that can be captured once and filed away. Students did value belonging, but the form it took changed over time. Some connections were disciplinary, some social, some practical, and some external to the university altogether. For UK teams, that matters because a single belonging score can miss whether students actually have the relationships and structures that make participation sustainable.

The second finding is that students often benefit more from agency in connecting than from being pushed towards a standard model of belonging. The paper shows how summer schools, orientation, halls, societies, lab groups, bursaries, and staff support can all help, but only when students can use them on their own terms. Chosen connections tended to feel more meaningful than prescribed ones, especially for students whose circumstances or identities did not align with an assumed ideal student model.

The authors organise these experiences as a spectrum of connection: expected connections, empowered connections, strained connections, and disengagement. That spectrum is more actionable than a simple belong or do not belong split because it shows where an institution is helping students connect, where it is asking too much adaptation from them, and where some students are beginning to withdraw altogether.

"Forcing students to connect to institutionally-provided structures risks them developing strained connections or disengagement altogether."

A further finding is that connection does not have to mean stronger attachment to the institution itself. Some of the most valuable connections sat in halls, clubs, local communities, work, or peer networks outside formal academic structures. This is especially relevant for commuter students, widening participation students, and students from minoritised backgrounds, who may build a workable university experience through a mix of institutional and external relationships rather than through disciplinary identity alone.

Finally, the paper shows that students can disengage when institutional expectations feel exclusionary, unhelpful, or discriminatory. That is a crucial student voice point. If universities only ask whether students feel they belong, they may miss the hidden labour students do to stay connected, or the reasons some stop trying to connect at all. Open-text comments, interviews, and pulse surveys are usually where that strain becomes visible.

Practical implications

For UK universities, the first implication is to stop treating belonging as a once-a-year KPI. Track it at key transition points: pre-arrival, induction, first assessment, mid-year, progression, and graduation. Pair closed questions with open-text prompts about where students feel connected, where they feel strained, and which routines or communities matter most.

Second, design for multiple routes into connection. A belonging strategy built only around departmental identity or official co-curricular offers will miss how students actually build supportive lives. Programmes should look at commuter patterns, hall experience, mentoring, bursary support, peer groups, clubs, local networks, and the timing of teaching and assessment, then ask which combinations make participation easier for different student groups.

Third, use student voice analysis to detect strained connections early. Comments about isolation, exclusion, loneliness, not fitting in, or avoiding certain spaces are not soft signals; they are operational evidence. Student Voice Analytics can help institutions categorise these patterns across large volumes of feedback, compare them by cohort or discipline, and identify where practical changes are improving connection over time.

FAQ

Q: How can we apply this without launching a brand new belonging survey?

A: Add a small number of open-text prompts to existing pulse surveys, module evaluations, onboarding check-ins, or continuation work. Ask where students currently feel most and least connected, what has helped them build community, and what makes participation harder than it should be. That gives teams more usable evidence than a single headline item on belonging.

Q: What should we keep in mind methodologically when using this paper?

A: This is a longitudinal qualitative study from one specialist UK STEMM + B university, so its value lies in depth and mechanism rather than national representativeness. It shows how belonging changes over time, which helps institutions refine what they ask locally and how they interpret their own survey and comment data.

Q: What does this change about how universities should interpret student voice on belonging?

A: It shifts the task from measuring whether students "belong" to understanding how they connect, adapt, or disengage across different parts of university life. That matters because a reasonable survey average can still hide strained connections in particular groups, departments, or stages of the student life course.

References

[Paper Source]: Julianne K. Viola, Luke McCrone and Martyn Kingsbury "Beyond belonging: connecting across the STEMM + B student life course" DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2025.2612098

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