Belonging grows in phases, starting with safety and recognition
Updated Apr 26, 2026
Belonging work often starts with a single survey item and ends with an action plan too vague to fix much. At Student Voice AI, we see the same problem in student comments: universities know belonging matters, but they do not always know what students mean by it. That is why Gulsah Dost's Journal of Further and Higher Education paper, "Reimagining belonging: a post-pandemic exploration of student perspectives", matters for teams using student voice to understand connection, inclusion, and persistence. It asks students to define belonging in their own terms, and the answer is much richer than a one-line score.
Context and research question
Universities increasingly treat belonging as a strategic indicator, linking it to wellbeing, continuation, engagement, and inclusion. The difficulty is that many definitions still come from adult-centred theory, institutional priorities, or inherited survey instruments rather than from students themselves. When that happens, institutions can end up measuring belonging before they have decided what counts as belonging in practice.
Dost tackles that gap through a mixed-method study in the UK. The paper combines a questionnaire with 290 A-level, undergraduate, and postgraduate students in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, plus interviews with 23 first-year undergraduates. The research question is direct and useful for UK higher education teams: how do students conceptualise belonging after the pandemic, and which elements of belonging should institutions pay closer attention to when they design surveys, support, and course environments?
Key findings
The headline finding is that belonging is not a single feeling. It develops through phases. The paper identifies four stages: adaptation, integration, continuum, and transition. That matters because universities often ask about belonging as though it were settled after induction. This study suggests the opposite. Belonging begins with early orientation and safety, deepens through recognition and relationships, stabilises only when positive experiences accumulate, and can be unsettled again when circumstances change.
Safety and self-integrity sit at the start of belonging, not at the margins of it. In the adaptation phase, students described authenticity, autonomy, self-integrity, and psychological safety as foundational. Before students can build strong social ties or academic confidence, they need to feel that the environment is safe enough to enter, read, and test. That is especially relevant for universities trying to interpret early feedback from students who are still deciding whether they can participate comfortably, not just whether they are present.
Recognition and reciprocity then become central. The integration phase was defined by shared identity, mutual recognition, and the sense of both needing others and being needed by them. One participant captured that neatly:
"feeling wanted, respected, and acknowledged by those around you"
That is a practical reminder for UK teams that belonging is not only about access to services or attendance at events. It is also about whether students feel seen, valued, and able to contribute meaningfully in peer groups, classrooms, and wider university life.
Belonging becomes more durable only when those earlier phases are reinforced over time. The continuum phase reflects a more stable sense of connection, but the paper is clear that this stability is conditional. Positive earlier experiences help it last longer. Negative earlier experiences shorten it. The paper also notes that wider shocks, including pandemic disruption and social context, can alter how secure or fragile that continuity feels. For institutions, the benefit of seeing this clearly is better timing: if early friction is ignored, later survey results may simply record a problem that has already settled in.
The transition phase is equally important because belonging can be disrupted as students move between stages, contexts, or expectations. The paper treats transition not as a one-off arrival event but as a recurring feature of academic life. Students may need to adapt again when assessments intensify, when relationships shift, or when a new environment demands different skills. That makes the study particularly relevant to universities already seeing evidence that student belonging declines over the first year, and first-generation gaps open later. Belonging work is stronger when it tracks those moments of re-adjustment, not only the start of term.
Practical implications
First, UK universities should stop reducing belonging to one or two broad items without follow-up. This paper suggests belonging includes safety, autonomy, recognition, social connection, and transition. If a survey only asks whether students feel they belong, it is likely to flatten those differences. A better approach is to pair a small core measure with targeted open prompts such as "What has helped you feel recognised on your course?" or "What has made it harder to settle this term?". That produces evidence that is easier to interpret and act on, which is especially important if teams want to avoid the measurement problems raised in belonging surveys need better validation before universities benchmark them.
Second, institutions should treat belonging as a year-round process, not an induction outcome. The phased model in this paper suggests that support is needed not only at entry, but also at the points where belonging has to be re-secured. In practice, that means checking in after first assessments, around key timetable or placement transitions, and when students return from breaks or move into new academic demands. The payoff is earlier intervention, before uncertainty hardens into withdrawal or low participation.
Third, universities should listen for recognition and voice, not only for general satisfaction. Students in this paper repeatedly connected belonging to being respected, valued, safe, and able to speak without penalty. That gives Student Experience teams a clearer route into practical change: personal tutoring, peer community design, staff approachability, and classroom norms all become belonging work when they affect whether students feel noticed and legitimate. The clearer benefit is that support becomes more relational and less generic.
Finally, universities should use open-text evidence to separate different kinds of belonging problems. Some comments will point to weak peer connection. Others will point to institutional scale, unfamiliarity, lack of recognition, or difficulty being oneself. That is where Student Voice Analytics fits naturally. It helps teams group comments about belonging, support, and inclusion with one reproducible method, then compare patterns by cohort and timing. Combined with a clear process such as the NSS open-text analysis methodology, that gives institutions a stronger basis for deciding whether the real problem sits in induction, course design, tutoring, or wider campus culture.
FAQ
Q: How should universities apply the four phases of belonging in practice?
A: Map them onto the student journey. Use entry-point feedback to test safety and orientation, mid-term feedback to test recognition and connection, and later pulse points to see whether belonging is becoming more stable or being disrupted again. This produces a clearer action plan than one annual belonging score because it ties interventions to the stage students are actually in.
Q: What should we keep in mind about the study’s methodology?
A: The paper is useful because it combines a questionnaire with interviews, but it is not a sector-wide benchmark. The sample spans A-level, undergraduate, and postgraduate students, and it focuses on mathematics, physics, and chemistry in a UK context. That means the findings are strongest as a conceptual and practice-oriented guide, not as a claim that every student group experiences belonging in exactly the same way.
Q: What does this change about student voice work more broadly?
A: It reinforces that belonging is not self-explanatory. Student voice becomes more useful when universities ask what helps students feel safe, recognised, and able to contribute, then read those comments systematically across time and cohort. That turns belonging from a vague institutional aspiration into evidence that can actually guide design, support, and follow-through.
References
[Paper Source]: Gulsah Dost "Reimagining belonging: a post-pandemic exploration of student perspectives" DOI: 10.1080/0309877X.2026.2622993
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