A scoping review asks how higher education defines belonging

Updated Sep 07, 2026

Tracii Ryan and colleagues reviewed 353 publications to examine how higher education research defines belonging. Their paper was published online on 22 March 2026 in Higher Education Research & Development. Paper and DOI.

Evidence available for this briefing: the publisher’s indexed abstract, results and selected discussion were accessible. This is a limited review; the complete paper and supplementary material were not retrieved.

Definitions in the reviewed literature

The authors report that 320 publications (90.6%) cited an existing definition and 43 (12.2%) used student data to develop definitions. These are overlapping categories, not complementary percentages of a single split.

The included literature dates from 2003–2023 and is concentrated in North America. The authors conducted a separate thematic analysis of the 43 student-based studies.

Their abstract characterises belonging as personal, contextual and capable of changing over time, with multiple cognitive, emotional and behavioural components. This does not establish one universally valid questionnaire, prove that existing measures are useless or test whether a particular survey redesign improves outcomes. Publisher results and abstract.

Make the question’s meaning clear

Our practical suggestion is to state what a belonging item concerns: a course, a peer group, a place or the institution. Invite students to explain what they had in mind rather than assuming the label has one shared meaning.

If changing questions, keep a record of the wording and intended interpretation. A new item may provide useful detail while breaking a previous comparison; make that trade-off visible.

Comments can help identify different meanings or questions for follow-up. They do not automatically validate a scale, represent non-respondents or establish why a group’s score changed.

The governance checklist can support the comment-review component. Decisions about questionnaire validity and intervention effects need evidence appropriate to those separate questions.

Review note, 7 September 2026: verified the review counts and overlapping definition categories, added the literature’s period and geographic concentration, and removed untested claims of stronger survey or product outcomes.

Reference

Tracii Ryan, Claudia A. Rivera Munoz, Lize Vanderstraeten, Boya Zhao, Yan Zhang, Siobhan Lynch-Wells, Michelle Walter, Jiadi Cai and Chi Baik (2026). What does it mean for higher education students to belong? Higher Education Research & Development. DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2026.2643247.