Belongingness, Social Connectedness, and Life Satisfaction in College Students after COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

University students' sense of belonging has been greatly underrated since the pandemic, despite the fact that school belonging has been studied for many years. Due to school closings during the pandemic, college students lost the majority of their social connections at their university, and they have trouble rebuilding their social networks after the pandemic. In the present study, the mediating role of social connectedness in the relationship between life satisfaction and university sense of belonging was investigated. The University Belonging Questionnaire was consequently initially translated into Turkish. The study sample included 456 college students from a public university in Turkey, with 75% of them being female. Findings demonstrated the validity and reliability of the University Belonging Questionnaire as a tool for Turkish culture. The findings showed that life satisfaction was significantly predicted by a sense of belonging. The findings also indicated that social connectedness has an indirect but significant influence on the link between a sense of belonging and life satisfaction. Implications for future studies and practice are discussed.

College belonging among university students during COVID-19: An online interpretative phenomenological (OIPA) perspective

“…The emphasis in this study on teachers as key facilitators of students' school belonging is consistent with findings documented in the existing literature. Avcı (2023), whose research carries particular weight in supporting the findings of the present study and who deals with the area of university students' school belonging after COVID-19, emphasizes the central role of professors in this context. Avcı asserts that professors hold a crucial position in shaping students' sense of school belonging, and emphasizes the importance of establishing close and meaningful relationships with professors as a means of fostering high levels of school belonging.…”

“…A comprehensive literature review was conducted to examine existing research on school belonging, university students' school belonging, school belonging during the COVID-19 pandemic, online interpretative phenomenological analysis (OIPA), and online photovoice (OPV). The review revealed that students at all levels, including university students, encountered challenges related to school belonging both before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (Ahn & Davis, 2020;Arslan, 2021;Avcı, 2023). Based on these findings, the researcher, who holds a professorship in the Department of Social Science Education, turned her attention to studying the school affiliation of social science students, recognizing the lack of studies that examined the school affiliation of this particular group of students.…”

“…In recent years, there has been a significant increase in global research on school belonging. Most of these studies have primarily focused on challenges to school belonging or predicted school belonging based on specific variables, and have predominantly employed quantitative research methods (Arslan, 2018;Arslan, 2021;Avcı, 2023;Potts, 2021). A notable strength of this study was the use of the OIPA method, which allowed for the simultaneous exploration of both facilitating and complicating factors related to school belonging.…”

A Systematic Review of Psychosocial Resilience Interventions for Children and Adolescents in the COVID-19 Pandemic Period

“…The COVID-19 pandemic caused negative effects on the physical (Liu et al, 2020), and psychosocial health and well-being of children and adolescents (Arslan et al, 2022;Avcı, 2023;Gifford-Smith & Brownell, 2003;Majercakova Albertova & Bolekova, 2022;Panda et al, 2021;Ravens-Sieberer et al, 2021;Xie et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2020b). Many international studies confirm the burden of children and adolescents, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, with anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress (Kar & Bastia 2006;Ma et al, 2021;Stavridou et al, 2020;Yıldırım & Çiçek, 2022).…”

Mediating role of academic grit and subjective vitality in the relationship between school belongingness and school satisfaction among middle school students who migrated after an earthquake

“…Studies on students' sense of belonging at school have shown a positive relationship with life satisfaction (Arslan et al, 2020;Avcı, 2023), subjective well-being , psychological well-being (Arslan & Allen, 2016;Arslan & Coşkun, 2023), and a negative relationship with internalized and externalized problem behavior and substance abuse (Arslan, 2022b;Arslan et al, 2020) and peer bullying at school (Xu & Fang, 2021). On the other hand, a study by Parr et al (2020) found that school belonging was positively related to belonging in general and negatively related to depression.…”