International student support: help, care and belonging

Updated Sep 14, 2026

What does a student mean when they say they feel supported: help with a problem, someone who understands, or both? That distinction matters when we turn student comments into priorities. In Studies in Higher Education, Yang (Vivian) Liu, Danni Liao and Alexander English examine how support from different people relates to international students’ belonging and psychological distress.

What the researchers asked

The study separates emotional care from practical assistance, and the amount of support from its perceived quality. An online survey conducted from October to December 2023 produced 232 valid responses from international students in China. Recruitment used convenience and snowball sampling, including personal networks and WeChat groups.

Students rated support from Chinese people and from other foreigners in China, termed sojourners. These categories extend beyond university staff and classmates. The researchers tested associations and indirect pathways through belonging. For UK teams, the useful starting point is the distinction between support experiences; the results are not a UK benchmark.

What the findings show

Emotional support differed by provider. Respondents reported more emotional support from other foreigners than from Chinese people. The difference in practical support was not statistically significant. A broad support score would leave these distinctions unexplored.

Belonging was associated with emotional support and perceived quality from other foreigners. Both associations were positive in the adjusted model. Belonging was also associated with lower psychological distress. The estimated indirect associations were consistent with the proposed pathway, but the cross-sectional design cannot establish its causal direction.

Practical help had a different pattern. Practical support from Chinese people was associated with lower distress directly in the model, without a significant indirect association through belonging. Neither group's practical support was significantly associated with belonging in that model. This cautions against judging every form of help by a belonging score alone.

The measure needs careful interpretation. The researchers retained only the six inclusion items after the original belonging measure fitted poorly. They measured general social connections in China, rather than attachment to a particular university. Support quality was assessed overall, without separate emotional and practical quality measures. No statistically significant interaction between support quantity and quality was detected.

The sample was concentrated among students from Asia and those studying in Jiangsu province. Together with self-reporting and non-random recruitment, this limits generalisation. The study does not establish that a particular support programme improves wellbeing, or that local relationships are unimportant.

Questions for UK student experience teams

Our practical suggestion is to review what sits inside your existing support category. Separate accounts of finding help, resolving a practical problem and feeling understood. Keep comments that describe several experiences together when interpreting them. This gives service teams a more specific issue to investigate than an undifferentiated positive or negative rating.

Invite students to explain who helped and what made that help useful, while avoiding unnecessary identifying details. Where they describe unmet needs, ask what a useful response would have looked like. The Leeds project on co-creating international postgraduate support resources offers a separate example of involving students in that discussion. The benefit is a response shaped by students’ accounts of the problem.

Keep the survey question, respondent group and collection period alongside the themes. Agree access and small-group reporting rules using the student comment analysis governance checklist. When sharing findings, distinguish reported experiences from explanations that still need checking. This makes the basis for a proposed action clearer to colleagues and students.

Finally, choose an outcome that matches the proposed change. If a team revises practical guidance, ask whether students can find it and use it to complete the relevant task. If it changes peer-support provision, ask participants about the relationships they experience. These are local evaluation suggestions, not interventions tested by this paper; they keep the evaluation tied to the intended purpose.

FAQ

Q: How can we apply this to open-text student feedback?

A: Start with a sample of support comments and check whether your categories preserve practical help, emotional care and perceived quality. Review ambiguous examples with students and relevant teams before extending the approach. The study used rating scales; this proposed comment-review method requires its own checking.

Q: Can we compare its belonging results with our university survey?

A: Not directly. Check the wording, population and setting first. This study's final measure used inclusion items about social connections in China. It cannot be assumed equivalent to a university-specific belonging question. Adding comments does not establish that two scales measure the same thing.

Q: What does this mean for student voice more broadly?

A: Ask students what support means to them before deciding how to summarise it. Keep space for experiences that do not fit the initial categories, and explain how the findings informed a decision. Our briefing on King’s separate wellbeing and course-feedback surveys considers the related question of keeping different sources’ purposes visible.

References

[Paper Source]: Yang (Vivian) Liu, Danni Liao and Alexander English. "Social support and psychological distress among international students in China: the mediating role of sense of belonging" DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2025.2566934

Published online: 2 October 2025, Studies in Higher Education.