College students’ sense of belonging in times of disruption: prospective changes from before to during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

The current study examined whether college students’ sense of belonging changed following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were 252 (66.7% female) first- and second-year college students at a large public university in the United States. It was hypothesized that students would report a decrease in their sense of belonging from before to during the pandemic. It was also hypothesized that female students and racial-ethnic minority students, respectively, would report steeper declines in their sense of belonging compared to their male peers and to their White, non-Hispanic peers. Repeated-measures data were analyzed using a multilevel modeling framework to test for mean differences in students’ levels of belonging from pre-COVID to during-COVID periods. No direct change in students’ sense of belonging was detected. Moderation results indicated that sense of belonging decreased significantly over time for racial-ethnic minority students but not for White, non-Hispanic students. The findings encourage higher education researchers and practitioners to consider the unique experiences of racial-ethnic minority college students during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Sense of belonging
• college students
• COVID-19
• coronavirus
• minorities

Disclosure statement

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

Declarations

Compliance with ethical standards

The authors report no relevant disclosures. We have followed ethical guidelines for conducting research with human participants. Prior to the study, we obtained a Certificate of Confidentiality from the NIH and UW-Madison IRB approval (protocol #2016-0001).

Availability of data and material

The datasets generated during the current study are not publicly available due to the funded grant's data-sharing process but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

1 An exploratory analysis examined whether risk-group sampling status moderated the within-person change in students’ belonging levels over time. Accounting for the covariates included in the direct model, this interaction was not significant, b = 0.11, SE = 0.10, p = .30, d = .07, and is not considered further.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse under Grant R01DA042093. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.