The Belonging Collective

Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it. H. James Harrington.

Having established in my blog, The Belonging Bonus that increased sense of student belonging will positively affect student performance, and then in Spot the Donkey, what factors might indicate a secure sense of belonging, we can now start to consider how we might measure a students sense of belonging.

Pete Drucker in early management theory established that, ‘What Measures gets improved,‘ and so, if we are to set about trying to raise the sense of belonging felt by our students, we need first to establish some sort of baseline to work from.

In general, the only way to attempt to measure an individuals sense of belonging is through student self reporting measures, which does in itself present an issue around self recognition and our own self assessment of feelings.

There have been a number of attempts to establish metrics around belonging and, by examining these, we can start to get a more detailed picture of what is really meant by the term, and how the PISA questionnaire balances these metrics in its own questionnaire. 

In 1993, Carol Goodenow carried out a study on the sense of school membership amongst adolescents and its impact on their motivation and grades. To do this, she developed the Psychological Sense of School Membership scale and administered it to early adolescent students in three high schools. She found that psychological membership in school substantially correlated with self-reported school motivation and, to a lesser degree, with grades and teacher rated effort. Her research also showed that a sense of belonging may have a more significant impact on students at the lower end of the academic performance spectrum, who will be less likely to risk possible failure in school by reducing their engagement with it. The powerful impact of belonging on less academic students is something to explore in a future blog post.

The scale itself measures three main constructs; connection with peers, connection with adults and connection with school through the questions shared in figure 2. 

Figure 4: The Psychological Sense of School membership Scale (Goodenow, 1993)

The Psychological Sense of School Membership Questionnaire is very much seen as having a well-researched foundation (Allen& Kern, 2017) and strong internal consistency, according to the Cronbach’s Alpha scale.

In 2013, Yilmaz et al developed a Sense of Belonging to School scale, based around the research of Goodenow. (1993) She used this scale with primary students in Turkey to assess their sense of belonging in school. In her research, she states that her results show the validity of the test, through its review via an external ‘expert in the field.’ 

Figure 5: The Sense of Belonging in School Scale (Yilmaz et al, 2013)

The development of both questions sets was based on extensive literature review. Goodenow’s questions were generated to reflect not only perceived liking, personal acceptance and inclusion, but also respect and participation encouragement, the perceived response from others and a sense of belonging to the wider school. (Goodenow, 1993) 

The Hemingway Measure of Adolescent Connectedness (HMAC) focuses on what they identify as connectedness across three sources: schools, teachers and peers. Through a 74 item questionnaire it asks how much an adolescent cares about, or is involved in 15 different relational and institutional contexts. Karcher asserts that this scale conceptually extends the Baumeister and Leary (1996) belongingness hypothesis from adolescents to adults and measures an adolescent’s ability to satisfy their need to belong through their multiple opportunities for connectedness with people and places. (Karcher, 2001, p.5)

Also measuring school connectedness, is the School Connectedness Scale (SCS) This 54-item measure assesses a student’s relationship withs school, adults and peers across, what it terms, belongingness, relatedness and connectedness. (SCS, Lee and Lohmeier, 2011) Similarly, this tool recognises belonging as a component of connectedness and, as such, assesses a wider range of factors than the PISA questionnaire is designed to do. 

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Mental Health (McNeely et al, 2002) uses 5 questions to assess the impact of school connectedness;

1. Feeling close to people at school.
2. Feeling happy to be at school
3. Perceiving to be part of the school
4. Feeling safe at school
5. Having the perception that teachers treat students fairly. 

In a follow up study, Brown and Evans’ (2002) used four items directly related to belonging;

1. I can be myself at school.
2. I feel like I belong at school.
3. I have friends at school.
4. I am comfortable talking with my teachers about their problems.

Which is a reduced question set, embedded within a larger study, in line with the PISA survey questionnaire. 

 PISA asks students whether they agree, through a 4 scale response; strongly disagree, disagree, agree or strongly agree, with the following statements about their time at school: “I feel like an outsider (or left out of things) at school”; “I make friends easily at school”; “I feel like I belong at school”; “I feel awkward and out of place in my school”; “Other students seem to like me”; and “I feel lonely at school” the responses to these statements are then combined to create the sense of belonging index, whose average is 0 and standard deviation is 1 across OECD countries. A positive score means that a student has a stronger sense of school belonging than is average across OECD countries. These same questions have been asked over previous PISA cycles, which allows us to monitor the changes in students sense of belonging over time. 

So, we can see that there are a number of ways in which we might set about devising a questionnaire that would help us to establish how connected our students might be to our organisation, and how strong their sense of belonging is. By using one of the questionnaires above, we may also have a wider response base with which to compare our results. Using the PISA questionnaire in particular would give us a wide base of international responses, over time, with which we could compare the responses of our own students.

What matters most, is how we then use that information.