Friendships and collaborative study shape belonging more than extracurricular activity
Updated May 27, 2026
Belonging does not only depend on whether students join societies or enjoy campus life. It is often built in the ordinary routines of university study: who you talk to, who you revise with, and whether course structures make connection easier or harder. That is why Kseniia Vilkova, Oksana Dremova and Irina Shcheglova's Innovations in Education and Teaching International paper, "The power of friendship and study collaboration on the development of students' sense of belonging: A three-year longitudinal study at Russian universities", matters for universities using student voice to understand belonging as something students experience day by day, not just report once a year.
Context and research question
Universities often talk about belonging as if it sits mainly in induction events, campus culture, or extracurricular life. Those things matter, but they can pull attention away from a more practical question: which forms of social integration actually help students feel that they are part of university life?
This study addresses that question through three waves of longitudinal data from undergraduate students at selective Russian universities. The authors examine four dimensions of social integration: friendship quantity, friendship quality, study collaboration, and extracurricular involvement. That makes the paper useful beyond its immediate context, because UK universities face the same operational challenge of working out whether belonging is being built through peer relationships, course design, or co-curricular activity.
Key findings
The main finding is that belonging was most clearly associated with the number of new friendships students formed, and with their engagement in collaborative study. In other words, belonging was linked not only to emotional closeness but to whether students were actually building active peer networks around their academic life.
The paper puts the point plainly:
"a sense of belonging is shaped by the quantity of friendships and engagement in collaborative study"
That matters because it shifts the focus away from a narrow idea of belonging as a feeling that students either have or do not have. The study instead treats belonging as something built through repeated interaction. For UK institutions, that is a useful reminder that course structures can either widen or restrict the chances students have to make those connections.
A second important finding is that friendship quality did not appear to carry the same independent weight once background characteristics were taken into account. That does not mean close friendships are unimportant. It suggests that when universities want to support belonging at cohort level, the more tractable issue may be whether students have enough routes into peer contact and shared study in the first place.
Extracurricular involvement also did not make a significant contribution once the wider model was controlled. This is a particularly helpful result for UK higher education teams, because it pushes back against the assumption that belonging problems can be solved mainly through clubs, events, or student life programming. Those activities may still help, but this paper suggests they should not be treated as the whole answer.
The broader lesson is that belonging sits closer to academic life than many institutions assume. Students build it through who they meet, who they work with, and whether everyday study practices create repeated, low-friction contact. That is why belonging evidence often needs to be read alongside comments about group work, induction, commuting, confidence, and support, not just under a single belonging heading.
Practical implications
For UK universities, the first implication is to treat peer connection as part of course design, not only student life provision. If students are more likely to develop belonging through friendship formation and study collaboration, then seminars, project structures, study groups, and induction tasks all become belonging infrastructure. The benefit is practical: belonging stops being a vague aspiration and becomes something departments can design for.
Second, institutions should measure belonging in a way that captures peer connection over time. A single item about whether students "feel they belong" is too blunt if the underlying drivers are changing across the year. Add open-text prompts about making friends, finding people to study with, and feeling comfortable asking peers for help, especially if you already know that belonging survey comparisons across time can mislead. That gives Student Experience teams a clearer explanation of what has shifted, which improves the quality of action.
Third, universities should not assume extracurricular provision can compensate for weak academic integration. If students struggle to meet peers in class, find collaborators, or feel recognised in their learning environment, societies alone may not solve the problem. This is where personal tutoring that strengthens student voice can help, because named relationships and early check-ins create another route for students to surface isolation before it becomes disengagement. The payoff is earlier intervention and more reliable evidence on where belonging is breaking down.
The paper also offers a useful prompt for Student Voice Analytics. When universities analyse free-text comments on settling in, peer support, group work, or course community, they should read those as belonging signals, not as side issues. In practice, recurring comments about not knowing anyone, struggling to find study partners, or feeling disconnected from the cohort can be just as important as a headline belonging score. That gives teams a stronger basis for enhancement, especially in commuter-heavy, large-cohort, or hybrid contexts.
FAQ
Q: How should a university apply this paper if it wants to improve belonging quickly?
A: Start with the academic settings students already use every week. Review induction, seminar design, early group tasks, peer mentoring, and study support to see whether they create repeated chances for students to meet and work together. Then ask students in open text what actually helped them make connections, because that will usually show more than a single score.
Q: What should UK teams keep in mind before generalising from this study?
A: The study is based on longitudinal data from selective Russian universities, so it should not be treated as a direct sector benchmark for the UK. The safer reading is that it identifies transferable mechanisms. Friendship breadth and collaborative study appear to matter for belonging, but each institution should test those patterns locally through its own survey comments, pulse feedback, and student support data.
Q: What does this change about student voice work more broadly?
A: It reinforces that belonging is rarely a standalone theme. It sits inside comments about course community, confidence, peer support, and access to help. Student voice becomes more useful when teams read those comments as evidence about how students are connecting to university life, not only whether they say they belong.
References
[Paper Source]: Kseniia Vilkova, Oksana Dremova and Irina Shcheglova "The power of friendship and study collaboration on the development of students' sense of belonging: A three-year longitudinal study at Russian universities" DOI: 10.1080/14703297.2026.2678386
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