Journal of College & University Student Housing Volume 50, No. 1 - 78

Residential Affinity Efforts and Sense of Belonging
COLLEGE STUDENTS SEEK TO BELONG, and higher education institutions
seek to cultivate belonging. Though many studies have examined sense of
belonging in higher education institutions in general and living-learning
communities in particular, we have focused on how students are impacted by
the efforts of campus housing staff to increase this sense of affinity in particular
residential environments. We operationalized a positivist paradigm to conduct
a descriptive, correlational study involving cross-sectional survey data in order
to understand which residential affinity efforts correlate with feeling as though
one belongs to a collegiate residential community. A number of residential
affinity efforts-such as community council participation, personal interactions
with the residential community director, and personal interactions with the
faculty-in-residence-proved to be statistically significant and positive in
their relationship to various aspects of the sense of belonging, while affinity
efforts involving the residential community social media, webpages, and
weekly newsletters were negatively related. Recommendations are made for
residence life and student housing professionals' practice and future research.
C
ommunity and belonging have been a longstanding emphasis of housing and
residence life staff and are part of the unique benefits received by students
living on campus (Cheng, 2004; Elkins et al., 2011; Hurtado et al., 2019;
Lounsbury & DeNeui, 1996). Though residents may experience community differently,
the resulting feeling should be the same: a sense of belonging, which Hagerty
and colleagues (1992) defined as " the experience of personal involvement in a system
or environment so that persons feel themselves to be integral " (p. 173). Because many
institutions have residential requirements for students, it is important for residence
life and student housing professionals to understand how their efforts may contribute
to or detract from students' sense of belonging. While much research has been conducted
about the sense of belonging in living-learning communities (Sax et al., 2018;
Strayhorn, 2019) and more generally within institutions of higher learning (Ahn &
Davis, 2020; Burke, 2019; Davis et al., 2019), no research to our knowledge focuses
on the sense of belonging in terms of a particular residential environment or its
relationship to efforts made by collegiate residence life and student housing staff to
increase this sense of affinity. Because student success is often dependent on belonging,
understanding the sense of belonging to subsystems or smaller environments
within a college or university may also cultivate a more general feeling of affinity to a
student's institution.
Volume 50, No. 1 * 2023 75
Journal of College & University Student Housing Volume 50, No. 1

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Journal of College & University Student Housing Volume 50, No. 1
