U-Belong is an interdisciplinary research project aiming to understand university social life

About us

Belonging is a state of being connected to others and the world around us.

With funding from the Medical Research Council, we are setting out on a three-year project to develop concepts and methods to understand loneliness in university students.

Since 2022, we have been:    

  • Analysing how social relationships change upon entry to university and testing whether these changes cause loneliness.   

  • Identifying the factors that predict loneliness and sense of belonging among first-year university students.   

  • Exploring how different students experience belonging and loneliness at university.   

  • Examining historical archives to understand how current thinking about university social life has evolved.    

  • Developing a new tool to measure students’ expectations of university and compare this to their experience, to help understand loneliness. 

A lack of belonging has previously been associated with poor academic and mental health outcomes in the student population [1; 2; 3]. This was echoed in our last U-Belong survey, where 1 in 4 students told us they sometimes feel they don't belong at their university (research paper in preparation). Loneliness has been identified as a main cause of mental ill-health in students. Attempts to address loneliness are hampered by insufficient conceptual understanding and a lack of relevant research tools. We aim to address these gaps.

We aim to understand the broad diversity of student experience and how this shapes differences in the experience of loneliness.

We work with students across the project to make co-creation a priority. Visit our student research team for more information.

We bring together a dynamic interdisciplinary team

We’d love to work with you

We will need all the help we can get to run this study effectively. If you are interested in this subject, please get in touch. We’d love to explore working together.

References:

  1. Tinto, V. (1975). Dropout from Higher Education: A Theoretical Synthesis of Recent Research. Review of Educational Research, 45 (1), pp. 89-125. https://doi.org/10.2307/1170024

  2. Thomas, L. (2012). Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: Final report from the What Works? Student retention and success programme. London: Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

  3. Kahu, E.R. & Nelson, K (2018) Student engagement in the educational interface: understanding the mechanisms of student success, Higher Education Research & Development, 37:1, pp. 58-71. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2017.1344197