Belonging surveys are stronger when students define what belonging means
Updated Jul 27, 2026
Universities now track belonging almost as routinely as satisfaction, yet many still use the term as if its meaning were obvious. At Student Voice AI, we see the same risk in student voice work: if teams do not know which kind of belonging they are hearing about, survey scores and comments become harder to interpret. That is why Tracii Ryan and colleagues' Higher Education Research & Development paper, "What does it mean for higher education students to belong?", published on 22 March 2026, matters. It asks a question UK universities should settle before they benchmark another belonging score: what do students themselves mean when they say they belong?
Context and research question
Belonging now appears in access plans, continuation work, induction strategy, and student experience dashboards across the sector. The problem is that many definitions used in surveys and policy documents were not built from student evidence. That weakens construct validity before any institution has even started to compare departments, student groups, or years.
Ryan and colleagues address that problem through a multidisciplinary scoping review of higher education literature. They identified 353 publications that met their inclusion criteria, then ran a thematic analysis of the belonging definitions those studies used. They also carried out a more focused thematic analysis of 43 studies that developed their definitions from student data. That makes the paper useful for UK higher education teams because it does not just ask whether belonging matters. It asks what universities are actually measuring when they say they are measuring it.
Key findings
Most higher education literature defines belonging without grounding the definition in student-derived evidence. The review found that 90.6% of included publications cited a pre-existing definition, while only 12.2% used student data to develop their definition of belonging. For UK teams, that is a practical warning. A widely used survey term can still rest on a definition students would not recognise as their own.
"common definitions and conceptualisations of belonging are rarely based on data derived from students themselves"
When student-derived definitions are used, belonging looks multi-dimensional and dynamic rather than simple and fixed. The review suggests that belonging in higher education is a complex experience spanning social, academic, and place-based dimensions, alongside personal, institutional, and political or structural factors. That matters because a single-item score can blur together very different problems: weak peer connection, low academic confidence, feeling unsafe in a space, or a wider sense that the institution was not built with you in mind.
Belonging is not only about friendship or campus atmosphere. The paper highlights how students' understanding of belonging also involves physical and digital environments, teaching and assessment, and whether university feels like a place where they can participate without excessive self-monitoring. That aligns with other belonging research we have covered, including what ethnic-minority students mean by belonging, where students' own definitions stretched well beyond generic ideas of fit or friendliness.
The review also shows why generic definitions travel further than the evidence behind them. Student-based belonging studies exist, but they represent a minority within the overall literature. In practice, that means universities should be cautious about treating one standard definition as universally valid across student groups, study modes, or institutional settings. The safer approach is to treat belonging as something that needs local evidence as well as a literature base.
Practical implications
First, UK universities should audit their belonging questions before they use them for targets, benchmarking, or intervention evaluation. Check whether current items only capture one slice of the construct, such as course fit or peer connection, when students may also be responding to academic legitimacy, campus spaces, digital experience, safety, or institutional recognition. That gives survey and insight teams a more valid starting point.
Second, institutions should pair scaled items with open-text prompts that surface which dimension of belonging is under strain. Questions such as "What has most helped you feel part of the university this term?" and "What has made that harder?" produce evidence that a score cannot provide on its own. Analysed with a reproducible method such as our NSS open-text analysis methodology, those comments can show whether a belonging gap is social, academic, practical, or structural. That turns belonging evidence into something teams can actually act on.
Third, universities should treat belonging as a cross-institutional design issue rather than a single Student Experience workstream. Teaching teams, assessment design, digital systems, support services, estates, and tutor relationships all shape whether students feel at home and able to participate. If teams are going to compare belonging themes across groups or track them over time, they should also document prompts, coding rules, and reporting choices with a student comment analysis governance checklist. That makes the evidence more defensible when it reaches senior decision-making.
FAQ
Q: How should a university redesign its belonging questions without starting from scratch?
A: Keep a small core set of stable items, but map them explicitly against the dimensions you care about rather than assuming one question can cover everything. Then add one open-text question that lets students explain what is strengthening or weakening belonging right now. That gives you continuity for tracking and enough context to interpret what the scores mean.
Q: What is the methodological limit of this paper for institutional decision-making?
A: This is a scoping review, not a single cohort study or a sector benchmark. Its strength is conceptual clarity, not causal testing. It helps universities define the construct better and spot where current measures may be too thin, but institutions still need to test those definitions against their own students, surveys, and comment data before acting on them at scale.
Q: What does this change about student voice practice more broadly?
A: It reinforces that student voice is not only about collecting more feedback. It is also about making sure the concepts inside surveys and dashboards reflect students' lived experience closely enough to guide action. When universities define belonging better, they usually interpret comments better too, which leads to more targeted and credible decisions.
References
[Paper Source]: Tracii Ryan, Claudia A. Rivera Munoz, Lize Vanderstraeten, Boya Zhao, Yan Zhang, Siobhan Lynch-Wells, Michelle Walter, Jiadi Cai and Chi Baik "What does it mean for higher education students to belong?" DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2026.2643247
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