Belonging works better as connection across the student life course

By Student Voice AI

Updated Apr 10, 2026

Belonging is often reduced to a single survey score, but that can hide where students actually feel supported, where they feel peripheral, and which parts of university life make participation harder than it should be. At Student Voice AI, we see those patterns most clearly in the language students use to describe connection, isolation, and the effort required to take part.

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 voice to improve the student experience. The paper argues that universities learn more when they focus on how students connect across time, spaces, and communities, not just whether they report belonging at a single moment.

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 flattens 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. For institutional teams, that makes the paper immediately useful: it offers a way to see where support needs to change as students move through university, rather than assuming the same belonging strategy works at every stage.

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 look healthy while still missing whether students have the relationships and structures that make participation sustainable, a warning that sits alongside why belonging survey comparisons across time can mislead.

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. That fits with evidence that welcome week attendance boosts peer belonging, but not every dimension of connection. 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 practical takeaway is simple: support works better when it expands students' options instead of steering everyone towards the same route into community.

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. It gives teams a more usable framework for intervention, because they can identify the point at which support turns into strain.

"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. For universities, the benefit of recognising this is practical: it widens the kinds of support and spaces that count when teams try to strengthen connection.

Finally, the paper shows that students can disengage when institutional expectations feel exclusionary, unhelpful, or discriminatory. That matters for student voice work. 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 first, which makes them essential if teams want to act before disengagement deepens.

Practical implications

For UK universities, the first implication is to stop treating belonging as a once-a-year KPI and start treating it as an evolving pattern of connection. Track it at key transition points: pre-arrival, induction, first assessment, mid-year, progression, and graduation, which is also why tracking student belonging over time for first-generation students matters for local survey design. Pair closed questions with open-text prompts about where students feel connected, where they feel strained, and which routines or communities matter most. That gives leaders a clearer basis for deciding what to change, and when.

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. The payoff is a belonging strategy that reflects how students really participate, not how institutions assume they should.

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. That makes it easier to move from anecdotal concern to evidence-based action.

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 and creates a clearer starting point for practical changes.

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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