Developing the Sense of Belonging Scale and Understanding Its Relationship to Loneliness, Need to Belong, and General Well-Being Outcomes

Abstract

The construct of belonging has played a central role in psychological theories for many years, prompting research that benefits many people. However, there is little consensus for how to measure sense of belonging. We developed an 8-item measure of belonging that is easily adapted to specific contexts. The items capture a sense of being valued, accepted, included/connected, and fitting into a social environment. Study 1 examined candidate items and facilitated item selection. Study 2 demonstrated internal consistency and convergent validity of the scale. Loneliness and belonging were inversely correlated but each made independent contributions predicting general measures of well-being. Together, they fully mediated the effect of positive social contact on three of the four well-being measures. Study 3 experimentally demonstrated the differential sensitivity of specific (belonging at your university) and global (belonging in general) forms of the scale. Participants who wrote about an experience of inclusion relevant to a specific context reported more belonging than participants who wrote about an exclusion experience, but only on the specific, and not global, scale. The measure of belonging reported here is validated in adult samples; it is a flexible tool for research on the sense of belonging, its antecedents, and consequences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/tursh and https://aspredicted.org/6j338.pdf. To obtain the author’s disclosure form, please contact the Editor.

Notes

1 The attention check procedure is described in supplemental materials.

2 There was one exception to this rule where we chose the second-highest loading item due to overlap in item content; the exception is detailed in Table S1 in supplemental materials.

3 Participants also reported whether the amount of contact was in line with what they desired (1 = Desired a lot more, 3 = Right amount; 5 = Desired a lot less). Analyses of this question are in the Study 2 Analysis file on OSF.

4 Nine participants (2.5% of the sample) had a quality weighted score of 0. Of those, two reported equivalent positive and negative contact, six reported days of exclusively neutral contact, and one reported no contact at all.

5 For example, one or more Heywood cases (Kline, 2011) emerged for subfactor loadings when a hierarchical structure was used, or for subfactor covariances when subfactors were simply allowed to correlate. These cases were resistant to typical revisions of the model specification that often solve those issues. See the Study 2 Analysis file on OSF for the model definitions.

6 Every effect in the analysis had the same significance status with or without the correction. That is, no effects emerged prior to corrections that failed to emerge after corrections. See the Study 2 post addendum analysis document in supplemental materials.

7 Responses to the writing prompt were content coded to assess manipulation effectiveness. A detailed description of the findings are posted on OSF in the Study 3 coding folder. In support of the efficacy of the manipulations, 99% of participants wrote essays congruent with their distance condition. Additionally, the essays of participants in the inclusion condition contained greater feelings of inclusion than those in the exclusion condition, and those in the exclusion condition contained greater feelings of exclusion than those in the inclusion condition.

8 Because we explicitly predicted the obtained patterns on the specific-state and global-trait versions of the SBS, we include analyses of just those two scales. The analyses replicate those reported here that included all four SBS scales. We also examined whether the predicted effects held controlling for university identity strength, which they did. These analyses are included in the OSF Study 3 analysis file.

9 Mellor et al. (2008) examined the relationships between the need to belong, loneliness, and other general outcomes. We attempted to conceptually replicate their analyses with data from our Study 2 but did not observe the same patterns. We refer interested readers to the Study 2 Post Addendum Analysis file on OSF.