What ethnic-minority students mean by belonging, and what surveys often miss
Updated Mar 10, 2026
At Student Voice AI, we see belonging problems surface most clearly when students explain why a course, campus, or peer group feels open to them or closed off. A 2025 paper in Studies in Higher Education by Jente De Coninck, Peter Stevens and Wendelien Vantieghem, "Sense of belonging defined: how ethnic-minority students conceptualise belonging in the university", is useful because it starts at the right place: not with the survey instrument, but with students' own definitions. For UK universities using student voice data to improve inclusion, that is an important distinction.
Context and research question
Belonging is now a common term in higher education strategy, access work, and student experience dashboards. The problem is that it is often measured before it is properly defined. Institutions may ask one or two survey questions about whether students feel part of their university, then act as though those answers fully capture the construct.
De Coninck and colleagues tackle that gap directly. Working in Flemish Belgium, where ethnic-cultural-minority students continue to experience weaker academic outcomes despite an open-access higher education system, they ask how ethnic-minority students actually conceptualise sense of belonging, and what that means for more valid measurement. The study uses qualitative content analysis of 69 interviews with ethnic-cultural-minority students. The context is not the UK, but the practical problem is familiar: if universities want to improve belonging, they need to know what students themselves are counting as belonging in the first place.
Key findings
The first finding is conceptual, but it has direct operational value. Belonging is not a single feeling that can be reduced to one neat survey item. Students described it across social, personal, and academic domains, rather than as one undifferentiated sense of fit.
"social domain is the most important, followed by the personal domain and to a lesser extent the academic domain."
That ordering matters. The paper suggests belonging is driven first by the quality of students' social world, not only by their formal academic role. If the social domain carries most weight, universities cannot assume that belonging will improve simply because teaching is well organised or support services exist on paper. Peer relationships, everyday recognition, and whether students feel at ease in ordinary campus interactions are likely to be doing a great deal of the work.
The personal domain coming next is also significant. Belonging is partly about whether students can be themselves without excessive self-monitoring. That has an immediate relevance for UK institutions thinking about ethnic-minority attainment gaps, inclusion, and campus climate. Students may be attending, passing, and engaging outwardly while still feeling that belonging depends on managing identity, code-switching, or deciding when it is safe to speak.
The academic domain still matters, but the study places it third rather than first. That is a useful corrective for institutions whose belonging measures focus mainly on teaching, staff contact, or academic integration. Survey instruments can look precise while still under-measuring what students actually mean. The authors therefore argue for a broader conceptual model of belonging, one that can capture more universal aspects of the construct across groups and contexts.
For student voice work, this is the most practical takeaway. A scale can tell you that one cohort reports weaker belonging than another. Open comments tell you which domain is breaking down. They reveal whether the issue sits in friendship networks, identity safety, recognition, support, or academic connection. That is exactly where systematic comment analysis becomes valuable.
Practical implications
First, UK universities should audit their belonging questions against the three domains identified here. If a pulse survey asks only whether students feel part of their course, it is probably capturing some academic belonging, but missing the social and personal dimensions students appear to prioritise.
Second, institutions should pair belonging scales with better open-text prompts. Questions such as "What has helped you feel part of the university this term?" and "What has made it harder to feel like you belong?" are more likely to surface mechanisms that teams can actually act on. Analysing those answers by ethnicity, mode of study, commuter status, or first-generation status can show whether some groups are carrying extra belonging work that averages conceal.
Third, teams should treat belonging as an operational design issue rather than only a communications issue. Peer networks, induction, group work, visible representation, everyday staff responses, and how quickly exclusion is addressed all shape the social and personal conditions of belonging. For teams using Student Voice Analytics, that means tracking belonging-related comments alongside themes such as respect, support, inclusion, and assessment fairness, then using those patterns to prioritise practical changes.
FAQ
Q: How should universities redesign belonging questions after reading this paper?
A: Start by checking whether your current items cover social, personal, and academic belonging rather than only one of them. Keep a small core scale for tracking over time, but add one open-text question that asks students what has most helped or hindered belonging recently. That gives you both a trend measure and a source of explanation.
Q: What are the limits of drawing conclusions from 69 qualitative interviews in one national context?
A: The study is strong for construct definition, but it does not estimate prevalence in the way a large survey would. The Flemish Belgian setting also has its own institutional and demographic features. For UK practice, the right move is to use the findings as a guide for what to test locally, then check whether the same domains appear in your own surveys, comments, interviews, and focus groups.
Q: What does this change about how we use student voice data on inclusion and belonging?
A: It shifts the task from simply monitoring whether belonging is "high" or "low" to understanding what belonging consists of for different groups. That makes student voice data more diagnostic. Instead of treating comments as anecdotal, institutions can use them to identify which parts of belonging are under strain, and where action is most likely to improve the lived experience.
References
[Paper Source]: Jente De Coninck, Peter Stevens and Wendelien Vantieghem "Sense of belonging defined: how ethnic-minority students conceptualise belonging in the university" DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2025.2507783
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