Data Toolkit

A NSSE Data User's Guide: Sense of Belonging

In 2020, NSSE added a trio of items to assess students' sense of belonging:

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements?
a. I feel comfortable being myself at this institution.
b. I feel valued by this institution.
c. I feel like part of the community at this institution.
(Response options: Strongly agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly disagree)

Sense of belonging is an important addition to the assessment of student engagement given its demonstrated relationship to student persistence, engagement, and development.

In this guide, we highlight approaches for institutions to examine their data about sense of belonging and, in particular, variation in belongingness by student background, and to consider how results can inform institutional action for improvement.

Getting Started with your Sense of Belonging Results
Do Your Students Feel They Belong? Examining Sense of Belonging and Engagement
Using the Sense of Belonging Interactive Data Display
Sense of Belonging to Bridge Academic and Student Affairs

Getting Started with your Sense of Belonging Results

Your NSSE 2020 sense of belonging data provides a wealth of information regarding your institution and students. We invite you to dive in to consider how to use your data to create a greater sense of belonging for students in your community. We recognize that it can feel overwhelming to know where to start! The steps below offer general guidance for your exploration into the data.

Step 1. Reflect on the concept and your results

What do you want to know about students sense of belonging?
What do you notice in your overall sense of belonging results? Do first-year results differ from seniors?
Which sense of belonging items are high? Which are low? How does this match what you expected?
Which student groups (e.g. majors, racial identities, etc.) do you want to see disaggregated data?

Step 2. Connect results to your campus context

What is your campus most interested in learning from your sense of belonging data?
Are there any current initiatives on campus, for example, efforts to improve student persistence or concern about some groups of students feeling welcome, that NSSE belonging data could help inform? In other words, rather than reviewing the data and determining new initiatives to create, how might the data be connected to existing campus initiatives?
Who on campus would benefit from having access to these data? Why would it be useful to them? Some obvious stakeholders include orientation, first-year experience programs, diversity and inclusion units, and advisors, among others.

Defining Sense of Belonging

gsw student walking

The psychological feeling of belonging or connectedness to a social, spatial, cultural, professional, or other type of group or a community (Hurtado & Carter, 1997).

Whether or not students feel respected, valued, accepted, cared for, included, and that they matter, in the classroom, at college, or in their chosen career path (Strayhorn, 2019)

Resources:

Hurtado, S., & Carter, D. F. (1997). Effects of college transition and perceptions of the campus racial climate on Latino College students’ sense of belonging. Sociology of Education, 70, 324–345.

Strayhorn, T. L. (2019). College students’ sense of belonging: A key to educational success for all students (2nd edition). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Step 3. Relate belonging results to other measures of student engagement and success

How do the sense of belonging results relate to your Engagement Indicators? Statistical tests can be run, but what is the overall pattern? For example, do you notice high first year student belonging and also high student faculty interaction scores?
Major is important to consider for seniors. What patterns do you notice in your Major Field Report results? Perhaps, physical science majors have a high sense of belonging and also have high student faculty engagement scores.
Identify academic programs where students have a high sense of belonging. In what ways could they teach academic programs with low sense of belonging to increase belonging among majors?
What do you notice about sense of belonging and students’ intent to return or overall satisfaction results? Add retention data to your datafile to test the relationship between sense of belonging and persistence

Are you ready to continue digging into your NSSE sense of belonging results? We encourage you to view our December 2020 webinar, Do Your Students Feel They Belong? Examining Sense of Belonging and Engagement, to learn more about your data.

Access the Sense of Belonging Tableau dashboard to see how institutions like yours compare on sense of belonging. Learn more about the dashboard in the section below.

View the webinar and slides —Do Your Students Feel They Belong? Examining Sense of Belonging and Engagement, with Jillian Kinzie, Allison BrckaLorenz and Colleen Lofton.

Using the Sense of Belonging Interactive Data Display

NSSE created a public Sense of Belonging interactive data display in Tableau to support the investigation of sense of belonging results and to provide institutions the opportunity to explore aggregate results by institutional and student characteristics of interest. The dashboard allows users to create similar peer groups by selecting institutional categories of Carnegie Classification, control, region or Canada, and MSI status, and filtering by a range of student characteristics, such as major, gender identity, racial/ethnic identity, enrollment status, etc. Using these selections, institutions can create more finely tailored groups to explore assessment questions and in particular, for comparative analysis. In addition, the “Download” feature allows you to save and share your results.

A Great Lakes University (GLU) implemented a redesigned first-year seminar program organized by “meta-majors” to help students learn about their major, make connections to an academic department, and be with likeminded peers. They want to know if the program is facilitating students’ sense of belonging.
Results showing, for example that GLU had a higher overall first-year student belonging scale score and an individual item percentage positive difference of 5% in comparison to the peer group might be an early indicator that the meta-major FY seminars are making a difference to belonging.
GLU could also take a deeper dive by refining dashboard comparison results and exploring more student characteristics of interest. For example, restricting major field categories to only include majors represented at the University and filtering results for first-generation students to assess the impact of the new seminars on these students who have historically been less connected to the institution and may benefit more from the personalized attention of the seminars, could provide quick insight into program benefit and suggest where additional assessment may be undertaken.

Thumbnail image of a chart in the sense of belonging tableau dashboard.

Do Your Own Investigation

Use our new Tableau dashboard to see how institutions like yours compare on sense of belonging. Leverage the “Download” feature to save and share your results!

Visit the dashboard

By using NSSE’s Sense of Belonging dashboard, institutions can filter to develop more refined comparison results for the sense of belonging scale scores and individual items to contextualize their results.

Sense of Belonging to Bridge Academic and Student Affairs

Students find belonging through experiences in-and-outside the classroom. It’s best when academic affairs and student affairs collaborate on solutions to create a community where all students feel they belong. How might you use your NSSE sense of belonging data as an occasion to bring academic and student affairs colleagues together to discuss results? To aid you in this task, we provide the following prompts.

To consider in preparation for a data discussion

Who in student and academic affairs would be interested in sense of belonging results? Consider departments including orientation, center for teaching and learning, advising, culture centers and offices of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Are there naturally occurring meetings, such as a Student Retention and Success Committee, or First Year Experience Task Force, who might be inclined towards results?
Could you create the “First-Year Students’ Sense of Belonging by Intent to Return to the Institution” graph using your results and provide to your campus Student Retention and Success committee to stimulate their interest in more results?

During the meeting

Share your NSSE 2020 sense of belonging data, and discuss overall sense of belonging and then focus on scores by student characteristics
- Which group(s) have the highest sense of belonging?
- Which group(s) have the lowest sense of belonging?
Are there other institution data sets or assessments you can use, in conjunction with your NSSE 2020 results, to learn more about if students feel cared for and connected?
Brainstorm other questions, analyses or groups to consider belonging results. For example, consider what you might relate to belonging scores, including GPA, or involvement in special programs. See for example the study from Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota, "Students' Sense of Belonging as a Predictor of Retention".

What do you want to know about students’ sense of belonging?

Launch your exploration of students’ sense of belonging with a question.

The questions below can be explored using your institution’s Sense of Belonging data and the aggregate NSSE Annual Results:

How does sense of belonging differ based on race/ethnicity, first-gen status, living situation, etc.?
What might our data tell us about the strength of our students’ level of belonging?
Are our scores high enough given the tight-knit, welcoming place we say we are?
How do we know which students have lower sense of belonging and help them?
Does belonging differ between public and private institutions?
Do students who intend to return feel more valued and like they’re part of the community?
Is sense of belonging different by area of study?
How might we examine the impact of first-year seminar participation on new student sense of belonging?
What is the relationship between quality of interaction scores and students sense of belonging?
We developed a series of programs to welcome first-generation students and wondered if our students’ sense of belonging results are higher than first-gen students at similar institutions?

Three students study at a table outside at California State University Dominguez Hills.

To help spark a few more ideas, we encourage you to read about the collaboration between academic and student affairs at California State University, Dominguez Hills. For example, their results support practices the Faculty Development Center had been and continues to use to teach faculty how to help their students feel valued on campus.

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Data Toolkit

A NSSE Data User's Guide: Sense of Belonging

Table of contents

Getting Started with your Sense of Belonging Results

Defining Sense of Belonging

Using the Sense of Belonging Interactive Data Display

Do Your Own Investigation

Sense of Belonging to Bridge Academic and Student Affairs

What do you want to know about students’ sense of belonging?

Data Toolkit

A NSSE Data User's Guide: Sense of Belonging

Table of contents

Getting Started with your Sense of Belonging Results

Defining Sense of Belonging

Using the Sense of Belonging Interactive Data Display

Do Your Own Investigation

Sense of Belonging to Bridge Academic and Student Affairs

What do you want to know about students’ sense of belonging?

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