Connectivity, community, and sense of belonging

This chapter illustrates how the change to a virtual setting challenged students' social connectedness and sense of belonging. It demonstrates how students found a way to build social connectedness in a virtual setting that reinforced their sense of community. The chapter discusses how Students of Color experienced the COVID-19 interruption. It offers insights into whether thriving in college is even possible for students when their means of creating community have been disrupted. At the University of Utah, the detachment was experienced by students in their interactions with faculty and their relationships with their friends, peers, and classmates. The closing of campus and the shift to online learning also limited students' social connectedness with friends, classmates, and peers. Students also relied on new communities to gain motivation and achieve academically. University employees were also a part of students' relational communities. Some students created a strong emotional connection with staff members, such as advisors and student affairs professionals. The pandemic and the resulting educational changes added another layer of complexity to the academic experiences of Students of Color. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

School Belonging in Online Instruction: Cross-Sectional and Prospective Relationships with Academic Adjustment in Higher Education Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The study aimed to analyse changes in school belonging in higher education students during online instruction and to verify its cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships with academic adjustment in the first and higher years of study. The research sample consisted of 169 higher education students (90.5% women, M = 21.71;SD = 2.63) in the first measurement (end of the winter term), and 77 respondents (96% women, M = 21.38;SD = 2.03) in the second measurement (end of the summer term). Self-report methods were used. Results showed a decline in school belonging among first-year students. School belonging significantly predicted academic adjustment, and the relationship with internal motivation persisted even four months later. The findings support the key role and need for facilitating school belonging in higher education students in the online environment. © 2023, Adam Marszalek Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Asian communities' well-being in Aotearoa during Covid-19: The mitigating role of sense of belonging in the relationship between racism and life satisfaction

INTRODUCTION: Anti-Asian racism was a feature of the social response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and its impact on the well-being of Asian communities warrants closer examination. The current study aimed to gauge whether the sense of belonging mitigated the adverse effects of racism on life satisfaction for self-identified Asian New Zealanders.METHODS: This analysis included 1341 responses to a cross-sectional online survey conducted in 2021. Descriptive analyses outline how components of a sense of belonging were distributed among participants and those who experienced racism during the Covid-19 pandemic. We used linear regression to examine the role of a sense of belonging as a potential pathway variable in the association between experiencing racism and life satisfaction.FINDINGS: In this survey, four out of 10 participants reported experiencing racism in the first 18 months of the pandemic. Participants' life satisfaction decreased slightly since January 2020 (p<0.001). Experiencing racism was associated with decreased life satisfaction. All the components of sense of belonging reduced the magnitude of this negative association between racism experience and life satisfaction, in particular, expressing one's own ethnic identity and belonging in Aotearoa.CONCLUSIONS: Given that anti-Asian racism is currently a feature of life and a significant stressor during the pandemic, this study provides empirical evidence of the protective role of a sense of belonging against anti-Asian racism. This study focused on Asian members in Aotearoa New Zealand, but its practical implications have the potential to support other minoritised ethnic communities who also experience racism during the pandemic and beyond.

Students' sense of belonging at a South African university during COVID-19

The research on students' sense of belonging in higher education has evolved into a prominent theme worldwide. Institutional research focuses on the institution understanding itself and helps leaders to rethink improvement initiatives. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has required of institutions to revise student support programmes and approaches to maintain a strong sense of belonging. The theories of belonging by Strayhorn (2012) and Dumford et al. (2019) were adopted to analyse student responses. The aim of the study was to understand students' sense of belonging and how the university responded to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure a strong sense of belonging. Data were generated through in-depth interviews with 45 undergraduate students from all seven faculties. The findings highlight notable prevention measures intended to limit the spread of the virus on campus and student support in the form of study devices and data. The post-lockdown changes included a return to face-to-face mental health support, drafting COVID-19 catchup plans for first year orientation of 2020 and 2021 cohorts, improving the student voice. Finally, notable principles for responding to a future higher education crisis are highlighted. These initiatives contributed towards establishing and maintaining a strong students' sense of belonging.

Investigating sense of belonging in Chinese international students

This study investigated Chinese international students' sense of belonging by exploring the cultural and cognitive validity of a commonly used sense of belonging instrument, namely the Hoffman et al.'s (2002) Sense of Belonging Scale. Cognitive interviewing procedures supplemented with open-ended questions were administered to 20 sophomore- and junior-level Chinese international students attending U.S. undergraduate institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The cognitive interview results indicated that participants understood most of the items, although some phrases were identified to be problematic given different meanings in Chinese. The qualitative aspects of the research showed that Chinese students were more likely to define belonging as connection to a social group or community. Participants also reported feeling lower levels of belonging because of the pandemic and limited institutional support. Ultimately, these findings could help to inform campus climate policies and practices related to supporting international students. Implications for developing culturally valid instruments of belonging are also discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

The Role of Social Support and Belonging in Predicting Recovery from Problem Gambling.

Research indicates a role for both social support and belonging in addiction recovery, however little is known about the role of these constructs in the recovery from problem gambling, and whether they relate to the effectiveness of mutual aid groups such as Gamblers Anonymous. The aim of this study was therefore to explore the relationship between social support and belonging, and to assess the role of demographics (including group membership of GA), social support and/or belongingness in predicting gambling addiction recovery in terms of gambling urges and quality of life. Using a cross sectional design, participants identifying as having problem gambling (n = 60) completed an online questionnaire with two independent variables (Social Support and Belonging), two dependent variables (Gambling Urges and Quality of Life) to assess gambling addiction recovery and measures of GA membership. The results showed no significant association between gender, age, ethnicity, education or employment status and gambling urges or quality of life. Membership to GA, and length of membership were significantly associated with gambling recovery indicating that being a member of GA and longer membership was associated with lower gambling urges and higher quality of life. Further, the results showed a high but not perfect correlation between social support and belonging (r(58) = .81, p = < .01). A regression analysis showed that although there was a significant correlation between social support and belongingness, they played different roles in gambling addiction recovery. Social support alone predicted higher quality of life, but not a reduction in gambling urges; belonging (along with being a member of GA) predicted a reduction in gambling urges, but not an increase in quality of life. Social support and belonging have a differential impact on aspects of gambling addiction, and should be considered as different constructs. In particular, whilst the process underpinning reduced gambling urges is membership of GA and the sense of belonging it provides its members, social support per se is a better predictor of quality of life. These findings have implications for the development of treatment for problem gamblers in the future.

The relationship between faculty interactions, sense of belonging, and academic stress: a comparative study of the post-COVID-19 college life of Korean and international graduate students in South Korea.

Objective: Rapid changes in post-COVID-19 higher education have increased students' academic stress. This study focused on graduate students' academic stress in South Korea and compared the results for Korean graduate students and those for international graduate students. Method: Using the online survey results, the study verified the relationships between faculty interactions, a sense of belonging, and academic stress among Korean and international graduate students using a mediating effects analysis and a multigroup path analysis. Results: The results were as follows. First, Korean students experienced greater academic stress, faculty interactions, and a sense of belonging, but no statistically significant difference was observed. Second, a sense of belonging had a mediating effect on the relationship between faculty interactions and academic stress. Unlike in previous studies, all paths were found to be statistically significant. Faculty interactions had a negative effect on academic stress and a positive effect on a sense of belonging. A sense of belonging had a negative effect on academic stress. Third, the comparison of Korean and international graduate students showed that international students had a greater effect of faculty interactions on academic stress. Conclusion: Through these results, we explored the post-COVID-19 academic lives of Korean and international graduate students in South Korea and built grounds for effective interventions for alleviating academic stress.

Tensions in Cultural Identity and Sense of Belonging for Internally Displaced Adolescents in Ukraine

This article examines the cultural, educational and mental health consequences of large-scale internal displacement for children and adolescents from the Donbas to other parts of Ukraine. The research findings and methodological innovations of the study are discussed in the context of forced migration and displacement caused by the previous (2014) armed conflict in East Ukraine and Donbas with additional challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Our data collection was halted by the military action in Ukraine that started in February 2022 that has caused another wave of forced migration. We reflect on the experience gained from conducting research on sensitive topics of displacement using online methods in the environment of restricted access to schools and adolescents. The adolescents who were interviewed described their experiences of displacement, which for some had taken place nearly eight years before. Trauma from conflict and displacement can have mental health, educational and social consequences for displaced adolescents. These displaced young people and their families face, as internally displaced populations, a double-edged sword in their relationship with their new contexts. They often have numerous challenges in their settling in a new location and public sphere given the existing ethnic, cultural and language diversity of Ukraine and yet have the advantage of being able to adopt and adapt to their new socio-cultural contexts relatively quickly and minimise their pre-migration identities, if they so wish.

A Cross-Cultural Study of Mask-Wearing During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Comparing China, Japan and the USA

During the Covid-19 epidemic, Japanese and Chinese have overwhelmingly tended to wear face masks, while Americans have not. Why? In this paper, based on ethnographic interviews with members of these three societies as well as examination of mass media and scholarly reports, I provide a preliminary interpretation of this question.I first consider social psychologists' large-scale analyses of collectivism versus individualism;China and Japan are both considered to be collectivistic societies, whereas the United States is considered to be individualistic. I also consider ethnic belonging to one's nation in China and Japan, as opposed to civic belonging to one's nation in the United States. These explications have value in understanding Covid-19 policies but seem of limited use in explaining mask-wearing. For such understanding, I turn to ethnographic interviews - some twenty in each society - as well as participant-observation in public sites.My findings are these: While in Japan social pressure is paramount in leading to mask wearing, with the state mostly absent, in China state pressure is paramount, with social pressure largely absent. In the United States, with social pressure absent beyond one's sub-group and state pressure hotly contested, mask-wearing becomes a matter of politically-based individual choice. In these three societies, there have thus been different axes as to why mask-wearing is accepted or contested. This research is of too small a scale to fully explicate these factors;but it does show how anthropological analysis is essential in combining with the findings of other disciplines such as social psychology to arrive at a fuller understanding of contemporary social phenomena.

Digital capital and belonging in universities: quantifying social inequalities in the Philippines

This study examines social inequalities in Philippine universities that were exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. A quantitative approach using a national sample of 677 university students was utilized to measure the mediating role of digital capital on social inequalities associated with belonging to academic spaces. For the purpose of determining direct and indirect impacts, structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed. Sociodemographic (i.e., gender, age, type of residence, and family income) and educational (i.e., type of university, year in the university, and excellence criterion) characteristics were the direct predictors that were examined as exogenous variables for both digital capital and belonging. Results indicate that type of residence (beta=0.200, p<0.05), family income (beta=0.220, p <0.001), and excellence criterion (beta=0.271, p <0.01) are major determinants of digital capital. The model also shows that belonging is significantly predicted by age (beta=0.087, p <0.05), family income (beta=-0.207, p <0.001), and digital capital (beta=0.576, p <0.001). Lastly, the findings reveal that the impacts of type of residence (beta=0.116, p <0.05), family income (beta=0.127, p <0.001), and excellence criterion (beta=0.156, p <0.001) on belonging are successfully mediated by digital capital. These results suggest that there are indeed differences in students' abilities to accumulate digital capital and that digital capital enhances the sense of belonging to and together in academic spaces for certain groups.

Reflections on Developing Academic Identity During the Pandemic

This work is a post-modern autoethnographic reflexive narrative about the internal journey in the development of academic identity arising in the context of the transition from working as a casual academic to engagement for a short-term contract and beyond in the quest for tenure during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is an exploration of my personal story about moving from the periphery of academic belonging and being, to reaching the turning point going ‘over the bridge' toward the future cycles of becoming that await. This study highlights the importance of a sense of belonging and connection in the academic community as a foundation for being and future becoming. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.

"It's hard to feel a part of something when you've never met people": defining "learning community" in an online era.

Feeling part of a community of learners has been shown to foster students' engagement and sense of belonging, leading to higher retention and achievement of learning outcomes. The pivot to online teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a reappraisal of all aspects of the student experience, including students' capacity and opportunity to engage in meaningful learning communities online. There has been some emergent literature which considers how to facilitate online learning communities in the emergency remote teaching context prompted by COVID-19. However, there is a notable lack of literature which considers how learning communities are defined, understood, and negotiated by students in this unique teaching context. Given how students' perceptions of learning communities contributes to Higher Education policy (e.g. through the National Student Survey), this is important to understand. In the present study (N = 309), we qualitatively investigated students' understanding and definition of the term "learning community" during a time of emergency pivot to online teaching and learning. A reflexive thematic analysis of students' first-hand responses generated three dominant themes: "Feeling connected: Bridging the gap whilst physically distanced", "Feeling included: Visible and valued", and "Feeling together: Mutuality and the shared experience". We discuss the implications for these conceptualisations of an online learning community and suggest ways forward for Higher Education pedagogy.

'This is our home': young residents' representations of Melbourne's public housing towers during 'hard lockdown'

On 4 July 2020, in response to a developing 'second wave' of COVID-19 cases, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews announced that a hard lockdown would be immediately implemented in nine public housing towers in Melbourne, Australia. Approximately 500 police were dispatched to implement this lockdown, with residents prevented from leaving their buildings. Over the next fortnight, young residents in these towers, often from socially- and economically-marginalised communities, emerged as advocates for their fellow tenants, using various social media platforms to broadcast their experiences. In this article, we analyse social media posts published by 28 social media users throughout June and July of 2020, which reported on the experiences of people living within the public housing towers during the hard lockdown. We draw on the concept of territorial stigmatisation tounderstand and frame how a traditionally stigmatised physical space is reclaimed via a digital medium. We explore the potential for young people to use social media to challenge territorial stigmatisation and construct alternate representations of place and community. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Youth Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Stories of Leadership: Leading with Empathy through the COVID-19 Pandemic

Leader–follower interactions during times of complexity are critical in managing rapid change demands and ensuring organizational sustainability. Between early 2020 and 2023, many organizations worldwide witnessed an unprecedented need for organizational change that rapidly transformed the work environment. This study focused on understanding the contexts of leader and follower interactions during times of change using the shifting organizational landscapes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Applying a qualitative methodology, we collected data from 12 leaders across multiple business sectors in Africa, Asia, and the United States using semi-structured interviews. We then transcribed the interviews and applied an iterative phronetic approach to analyze the data by engaging complexity leadership, emotion in organizations, leading with empathy, belonging, and power and control as theoretical lenses for data analysis. We analyzed how individual leadership experiences during a time of complexity fostered a shift in leadership paradigms and leadership styles within organizations. The findings indicated that due to the unprecedented situations faced during COVID-19, leaders shifted from leadership styles that applied a lens of power and control to an adaptable model that follows the framework of complexity leadership and applies a lens of leading with emotional intelligence. The findings provided a nuanced understanding of the leader–follower relationship by allowing for a complex and varied description of how individuals discursively situate their experiences around issues of power and control. The findings also showed that leaders became more intentional about leading, purposely changing their leadership style to create an environment that supported open communication, belonging, empathy, and awareness. The findings also suggested that when leaders adapt elements of emotional intelligence in leading during times of organizational complexity, they do so with the goal of motivating others and creating a feeling of connection with followers. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Belonging, Wellbeing and Stress with Online Learning during Covid-19

Sense of belonging, perceived stress and wellbeing are reported factors that influence students' university experience and learning. The COVID-19 pandemic and shift to online emergency remote teaching were likely to exacerbate these affective dimensions of student experience. This article employed a quantitative survey research design to determine how students' sense of belonging, perceived stress and wellbeing were influenced during the pandemic. An online questionnaire was administered to 537 South African students at one residential university. Data analysis was performed using multiple regression analysis. The results indicated that platform pedagogy was a significant predictor of belonging, perceived stress, and wellbeing, while lecturers' pedagogical competence was not. Lived learning experience of online learning was a significant predictor of perceived stress, and communication was a significant predictor of belonging. The importance of the learning environment in student belonging and wellbeing is key to student success and this study provides insights for developing targeted interventions.

'Loboko Ya Mama': Homemade recipes of belonging

During the COVID-19 pandemic, migrants in South Africa were not only exempted from social allowances such as food parcels but also targeted by xenophobic sentiments. Consequently, migrants who were already pushed to the margins of society experienced an increased sense of alienation from South African society. Based on Food for Change,(1) an online project in which eight forced migrant women from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda living in Gqeberha, South Africa, shared cooking recipes during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article approaches the cultivation of a sense of home and belonging through food. Using the concept of visceral politics, it analyses how food created a visceral experience in which embodied subjects acquire personal pleasure, affiliation with other embodied subjects and a sense of connectedness to their places of origin and South Africa. This approach documents how women exercised creative agency through their cooking by implementing knowledge from their home countries, acquiring new knowledge from other cuisines and adapting local ingredients and techniques to create meals that unite their households around the pleasure of eating 'exactly like home'. In this way, they were able to reduce the impact that the alienating anti-migrant discourses outside their homes had on the everyday life inside them.

Dirty politics: The stories of soap in South Africa

During the global Covid-19 pandemic, the practice of extensively washing one's hands with soap and water became ubiquitous worldwide. In this contribution, I look at how cultural references to soap have been productive in producing social identities in South Africa. By utilizing Nira Yuval-Davis's (2006) distinction between belonging and the politics of belonging, I trace how stories and narratives featuring soap that circulate in the South African cultural archive refer to specific cultural templates or social imaginaries. These stories and narratives perform different functions: they signify categories of social belonging, enable social subjects to identify with specific subject locations, and are utilized to both confirm and patrol the borders of these categories of belonging in acts that may be described as the "politics of belonging. "

Post-Secondary Student Belonging in a Virtual Learning Environment during Covid-19

Psychological and social adjustment and academic success in post-secondary institutions are supported by a sense of belonging to a social group and having meaningful relationships with other students, staff, and faculty members. This exploratory study used a qualitative approach to investigate post-secondary students' sense of belonging in the virtual learning environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study was conducted at a small Western Canadian university. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 participants who were undergraduate students, from various faculties, and in different years in their programs. Findings were clustered into three themes: (1) student expectations of university, (2) impact of virtual learning environments on students, and (3) the role of educators. Recommendations are included to enhance support and belonging for post-secondary students in virtual learning environments.

University student belonging scale: Defining and evaluating students' sense of belonging to their university

Students' Sense of Belonging (SoB) to a University is important because high levels of Sense of Belonging have a positive impact on students' motivation and retention. This mixed methods research design was developed to define Sense of Belonging to the University from the students' perspective, create a more comprehensive measurement tool for Sense of Belonging to the University, and investigate the impact involvement in Student Affairs programs may have on Sense of Belonging to the University.The empirical analysis of the first phase of research led to the development of a new definition for Sense of Belonging to the University, and the themes identified within the data informed the development of the University Student Belonging Scale (USBS). Principal components analysis indicated a four-component structure was the best fit for the data: Feelings that Impact Belonging (20 items), School Spirit (13 items), Social Connections at the University (12 items), and Academic Focus & Support (9 items). Scores can be calculated for each component and as an overall score for Sense of Belonging to the University, with the final version of this 54-item measurement instrument.The results in the evaluation phase indicate the program type (i.e., Student Affairs, Academic Affairs, or other groups) in which a student is involved can make a difference on their level of Sense of Belonging to the University. However, the number of Student Affairs programs in which a student is involved does not have an impact on Sense of Belonging to the University. An investigation into the differences between students who began attending classes prior to the Covid-19 pandemic and students who began attending classes during the Covid-19 pandemic revealed there was only a statistical difference between these groups for Feelings that Impact Belonging.This research highlights the importance of a more comprehensive, validated instrument to measure Sense of Belonging to the University. The USBS can be used to answer research questions higher education administrators, policymakers, parents, and students want to know the answers to. These answers will inevitably lead to more effective support for university students and higher levels of Sense of Belonging to the University. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Time shifts: Place, belonging, and future orientation in pandemic everyday life.

The disruptions to everyday life wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic include distortions in the experience of time, as reported widely by ordinary citizens and observed by journalists and social scientists. But how does this temporal disruption play out in different time scales-in the individual day as opposed to the medium- and long-term futures? And how might place influence how individuals experience and understand the pandemic's temporal transformations? This essay examines a range of temporal disruptions reported in day diaries and surveys submitted to the Everyday Life in Middletown project, an online archive that has been documenting ordinary life in Muncie, Indiana, USA since 2016. Viewing these materials as instances of life writing, the essay probes the interactions between temporal disruptions and the local setting as they inflect the autobiographical selves our writers construct in their pandemic writings. It shows how living in Muncie-a postindustrial city with its particular combination of historical, demographic, economic, social, and political dynamics-structures the autobiographical stories available to our writers, and how the disruption of time produces new variations and problems for life writing. In the midst of a global crisis, we glimpse the pandemic's reshaping of a local structure of feeling in which a pervasive, local narrative of civic decline frames individual self-fashioning.