Journal of College & University Student Housing Volume 50, No. 1 - 97
Residential Affinity Efforts and Sense of Belonging
Finally, social media had only a negative, statistically significant correlation across
the subscales of satisfaction, identification, perceived faculty support, and perceived
peer support. Although some literature has suggested that social media contribute
to belonging (Vincent, 2016), our study suggests that they may actually detract from
some aspects of belonging like satisfaction, identification, perceived faculty support,
and perceived peer support. Future research should further explore the impact of social
media and belonging to a residential community. It is recommended that housing and
residence life efforts deemphasize social media in their efforts to increase a sense of
belonging, limiting them to business or operational communications.
LIMITATIONS
While we believe this study to be sound, we note three limitations. First, a correlation
study does not equate to causation. We encourage further research on RAEs at other
institution types employing a myriad of housing operation types (e.g., traditional,
apartments, living-learning communities, and residential colleges). Second, because
the fidelity of RAEs varies year by year, longitudinal studies should explore how the
quality and impact of such efforts change. For instance, do programmatic changes in
orientation or the quality of community council advisors impact the sense of belonging
associated with these RAEs? Finally, we acknowledge a limitation in the scale reliability
of the modified Hoffman and colleagues' (2002) SOBS. Specifically, we decreased the
existing scales of perceived faculty support from six items to the two that were relevant
to the purpose of the study. We also removed the subscales " empathetic faculty understanding "
and " perceived classroom comfort, " as the items were not relevant to the
study's purpose. These modifications threaten the reliability of the instrument; however,
we used Cronbach's alpha to report the adapted scales' reliability. Future researchers
should develop and validate SOBSs for use in the collegiate residence life context.
CONCLUSION
The value of students feeling that they belong cannot be understated. The results of
our study show that efforts by residential community professional staff, faculty, and
volunteer student-leaders vary in their contributions to sense of belonging, ranging
from weak but consistent positive correlations with most if not all subscales (i.e., personal
interactions with the residential community director) to only weak negative correlations
(i.e., residential community social media) with some subscales. Our results
indicate that the greatest impact on belonging is experiences with people (e.g., FIRs,
RAs, residential community directors) rather than more indirect efforts like community
orientations or weekly newsletters. To cultivate residential sense of belonging,
events should emphasize opportunities for interaction between faculty/staff and students.
While our results parallel those of previous research, future research should be
conducted on sense of belonging in the collegiate residence life context. In particular,
scholars should continue to study RAEs and their contributions to sense of belonging
and overall student success.
94 The Journal of College and University Student Housing
Journal of College & University Student Housing Volume 50, No. 1
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