Belongingness, connectedness & engagement: The impacts of an LGBTQ + residential learning community

Abstract

University housing can play a significant role in undergraduate students’ college experiences. Unfortunately, many LGBTQ + students face a myriad of harmful experiences on campus, including in campus housing that can negatively impact their belonging and well-being. To address this issue and foster LGBTQ + students’ overall belongingness on campus and well-being, many universities offer LGBTQ + inclusive housing initiatives, including some offering residential learning communities (RLCs). There is a dearth of research on LGBTQ + RLCs’ effectiveness. Through qualitative interviews (n = 9), we examine the inaugural year of an LGBTQ + RLC at large state university in the southern United States. Based on existing literature on the importance of collegiate housing, including research on RLCs highlighting their benefits for students’ belongingness, connectedness, and engagement, we used a directed qualitative content analysis approach to explore the impacts of the LGBTQ + RLC. Consistent with the existing literature about RLCs in general, our findings suggest that the first year of the RLC fostered students’ belongingness, connectedness, and engagement across multiple levels. The RLC did this by offering students opportunities to explore their LGBTQ + identities and build community via programming with one another, which allowed students to feel safe and be their authentic selves.

Keywords:

• Residential learning community
• LGBTQ+
• campus inclusion
• campus climate

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 In this article we will use the umbrella term LGBTQ + to represent both the participants in our study and the broader community. When referencing others’ research, we use the terminology or acronyms they used in their publication.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Texas Arlington under the Provost Seed Grant [Grant number 360426].

Notes on contributors

Brittanie Atteberry-Ash

Brittanie Atteberry Ash (she/her/hers) MSW, PhD is an assistant professor at Colorado State University in the School of Social Work. She conducts research to better understand how best to support and build environments that are inclusive and affirming of LGBTQ + people and communities. Her work relies heavily on an intersectional lens to deepen the discipline’s understanding of risk and resilience among people with marginalized identities. Brittanie also focuses on promoting social justice and inclusion within social work classroom experiences and identifies strategies for educators to more fully integrate a critical social justice lens into pedagogy.

Jessica R. Williams

Jessica R Williams (she/her/hers) MSW is a assistant professor in the School of Social Work at Texas State University. Her research centers on the perpetration and perpetuation of systemic and identity-based violence and the social work approaches and contributions to interrupting violence. She conducts research from a critical and anti-oppressive perspective to broaden social work advocacy and social change.

Hayden T. DuBois

Hayden DuBois (he/him/his) M.S. is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Arlington in the management department of the College of Business. His work focuses primarily on understanding the lived experiences of LGBTQ + employees, and the formal and informal ways organizations can foster a culture that is supportive of LGBTQ + employee authenticity. He leverages mixed methods to better center participants’ stories in his work while still providing hands-on practical ways organizations can improve their culture and treatment of LGBTQ + employees.

Beth Pearson

Beth Pearson, MSW (she/her/hers) MSW is a PhD candidate in the Higher Education department at the University of Denver. Her dissertation is titled, ‘Queer in the Academy: Cultivating Community Among Queer Graduate Students’. Her research agenda includes issues surrounding queer graduate students, mental health on campus, and ableism in higher education. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware with her pup Bailey.