College Students’ Sense of Belonging: A Key to Educational Success for All Students by Terrell L. Strayhorn (review)

Understanding how to facilitate college students’ sense of belonging is a key element for campus administrators and higher education researchers concerned with student persistence, success, and a variety of learning and development outcomes. With this in mind, College Students’ Sense of Belonging provides a useful and necessary discussion of sense of belonging among different groups of students in a variety of college contexts. Written in a style and tone that is scholarly yet accessible, theoretical and practical, Terrell Strayhorn offers a text appealing to the intended audiences of student affairs educators, faculty, deans, and others in academic affairs units, graduate students in higher education and students affairs programs, and finally even undergraduate students. The book represents a compilation of Strayhorn’s extensive research on sense of belonging, and in a break from traditional scholarly writing, Strayhorn also discusses the impetus for each of the studies presented in the text.

The first three chapters of the book provide a working definition of sense of belonging, and a synthesis of the related research on the topic. Strayhorn describes several core elements of sense of belonging, including its function as a basic human need and fundamental motive of human behavior. Sense of belonging takes on importance based on context and time, and is especially salient among marginalized groups. Feelings of mattering to others can lead to sense of belonging, which in turn promotes a variety of “positive and or/ prosocial outcomes such as engagement, achievement, wellbeing, happiness, and optimal functioning” (p. 22). The intersections of various social identities produce unique experiences of belonging in various contexts, such that not all students experience belonging in the same way in the same context. Finally, students’ need to belong is a continuous process that changes as contexts change.

To close out this section and set the stage for the subsequent chapters, Strayhorn offers a model that depicts sense of belonging in which students enter various college environments with a basic need to belong, leading to positive outcomes when fulfilled, or negative outcomes when thwarted or diminished.

The conceptual foundation for sense of belonging provided in the first three chapters is reiterated in the subsequent seven chapters discussing sense of belonging among Latino/a college students, gay students, first-year students, students of color in STEM majors, Black male collegians, graduate students, and students involved in campus clubs and organizations. The research presented in these chapters includes single and multi-institutional studies that used quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method approaches. Each chapter provides an introduction and purpose, a review of the literature related to sense of belonging for each student population and a description of Strayhorn’s research methods and findings on the topic. The discussions of implications for practice for campus administrators come with many practical examples of programs, services, and policies that can promote sense of belonging. In support of the premise of sense of belonging as a basic human need, Strayhorn intentionally returns to the definition of sense of belonging at the conclusion of each chapter. As such, each of these chapters stands alone, making it possible for a reader to review only those pertinent chapters without reading the entire book.

Several chapters discuss sense of belonging within other theoretical and conceptual frameworks. Using Tinto’s (1993) framework of student departure, Strayhorn examines the academic and social experiences that contributed to Latino/a students’ sense of belonging rather than Tinto’s often critiqued concept of integration. Intersectional theory—that social identities are interconnected and construct individual experiences within systems of power, privilege, and oppression (e.g., Dill & Zambrana, 2009) —is used to consider the difference in how students of color in STEM experience belonging in ways that are different from other students. The work of Wiedman, Twale, and Stein (2001) on graduate student socialization frames the discussion of graduate students’ sense of belonging, while the examination of clubs and organizations and vehicles for...