What new students need to feel they belong, and stay well

By Student Voice AI

Updated Mar 28, 2026

At Student Voice AI, we pay close attention to the early comments students leave about settling in, because a weak sense of belonging often shows up in open text before it is visible in a headline score. That is why Min Hooi Yong, Gladson Chikwa and Javairia Rehman's paper in Innovations in Education and Teaching International, "Factors affecting new students' sense of belonging and wellbeing at university", matters for UK universities using transition surveys, induction feedback, and student comments to improve the first-year experience.

Context and research question

Belonging and wellbeing are often discussed together in student experience work, but they are not always analysed together. Universities may run a wellbeing survey, a welcome-week evaluation, and a course pulse survey, then review each stream separately. The risk is that teams miss how academic pressure, peer relationships, living arrangements, and personal circumstances combine in a new student's day-to-day experience.

Yong, Chikwa and Rehman focus specifically on newly enrolled students, including undergraduate and postgraduate students, and home and international students, at a UK university. Their small-scale qualitative study draws on interviews with eight students conducted in November 2022. The practical question is simple but important: what shapes a new student's sense of belonging and wellbeing, and how do those influences differ across student groups?

Key findings

The paper's central finding is that belonging and wellbeing are shaped by four overlapping domains: academic, social, surroundings, and personal space. That matters because it moves the discussion beyond the usual assumption that belonging is mainly about making friends or attending induction events.

As the abstract puts it:

"an interplay of factors including academic, social, surroundings, and personal space influence new students' sense of belonging and wellbeing"

The academic domain matters immediately. New students are trying to interpret workload, expectations, teaching styles, and what counts as successful participation in their discipline. For some, especially students navigating a compressed postgraduate timetable or an unfamiliar academic culture, belonging is partly about whether they feel capable and legitimate in the classroom, not only whether they feel socially welcome.

The study also reinforces that social belonging is unevenly distributed. Students do not enter university with the same confidence, available time, or access to informal networks. The paper highlights differences across undergraduate and postgraduate students, home and international students, and students with different age, gender, and socio-economic circumstances. In practice, that means the same induction or support offer can land very differently across the cohort.

Just as importantly, the paper broadens what universities should treat as "belonging" evidence. The authors draw on a framework that includes surroundings, such as living space and cultural or geographical location, and personal space, such as life satisfaction, identity, and individual circumstances. For UK HE teams, that is a useful reminder that a student's comment about commuting, housing, finances, or fitting in locally may be a belonging signal, not a separate operational issue.

Taken together, the findings argue against one-size-fits-all transition support. Belonging is not a single emotional state that can be fixed with one intervention. It is produced through the interaction of course design, social connection, environment, and personal circumstances. That is exactly why open-text feedback matters: students can explain which part of the system is creating friction.

Practical implications

First, universities should redesign early-term feedback around the four domains this paper identifies. Instead of asking only whether students feel they "belong", ask short open-text questions such as: "What has helped you settle in academically?", "What has made it harder to connect socially?", and "Has anything about your living or personal situation affected your experience so far?" That gives teams evidence they can route to the right service instead of treating belonging as a vague sentiment.

Second, institutions should segment transition feedback more carefully. Home and international students, undergraduates and postgraduates, commuters, mature students, and students from different socio-economic backgrounds may be describing different barriers under the same broad theme. Student Voice Analytics fits naturally here: categorising belonging and wellbeing comments at scale makes it easier to see whether concerns are clustering around academic confidence, peer connection, environment, or support access.

Third, UK universities should treat belonging and wellbeing as operational issues, not only cultural aspirations. If comments repeatedly point to timetable pressure, inaccessible support, poor local orientation, or a weak sense of academic fit, those are design problems that can be changed. This paper is a reminder that listening well at the start of the student journey can prevent later disengagement.

FAQ

Q: How should universities apply this paper when designing first-term student feedback?

A: Use a short pulse survey with open-text prompts that map onto the four domains in the paper: academic, social, surroundings, and personal space. That helps teams distinguish between students who are struggling with course expectations, peer connection, accommodation or commuting, or wider personal pressures, and it makes action planning much more specific.

Q: What are the methodological limits of this study?

A: It is a small qualitative study based on interviews with eight students at one UK university, so it is designed to explain mechanisms rather than estimate prevalence. That means institutions should not treat the findings as a sector-wide benchmark. They are best used as a framework for interpreting local survey comments, focus groups, and transition feedback.

Q: What does this change about how we interpret student voice on belonging and wellbeing?

A: It suggests that comments about belonging should not be read narrowly as social satisfaction. A student may feel disconnected because of workload, uncertainty about academic expectations, housing, finances, identity, or a combination of factors. Student voice becomes more useful when institutions analyse those distinctions systematically instead of collapsing them into one score.

References

[Paper Source]: Min Hooi Yong, Gladson Chikwa, Javairia Rehman "Factors affecting new students' sense of belonging and wellbeing at university" DOI: 10.1080/14703297.2025.2453104

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