Yes / Most studies investigated the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) for healthcare and educational purposes, but little is known on the effectiveness of VR in social interaction. Our aim was to examine whether VR would be similar to in-person interaction in reducing loneliness. A total of 73 participants participated in this study. They were randomly assigned to in-person or VR condition and interacted for 15 minutes about a tourist landmark. Participants completed a set of questions that measured belonging – acceptance and exclusion, positive and negative affect, wellbeing, trust, and mood before and after the interaction. Results showed that in both conditions, loneliness was significantly lower, with higher wellbeing, higher positive and lower negative affect, feeling happier and had more fun post task. Trust was higher in the VR condition post task but not for in-person. Our regression analyses showed that having higher wellbeing was a significant predictor in reducing loneliness for in-person condition and that being older and higher belonging – acceptance were significant predictors on feeling lonelier for the VR condition. In sum, our results demonstrated some success in reducing loneliness in VR but may not be sufficient to develop lasting friendship.

The following research project is split into two phases and concludes with a synthesis of both phases. The overarching aim of the research project is to explore how mainstream schools can best work with alternative providers to make collective provision for those identified as having Behavioural, Emotional and Social Difficulties. In the first phase, a realistic evaluation methodology (Pawson & Tilley, 1997) is adopted and semi structured interviews are used to explore the experiences of staff in relation to pupils on a shared placement. A provisional theory is then developed to explain the outcomes of the shared placement arrangement. The second phase of the research involves gathering the views and perceptions of the pupils and also utilises the realistic evaluation approach. The aim of this phase is to refine and update the provisional theory developed in Phase 1. This study adopts a mixed methods approach, utilising semi-structured interviews with the pupils. A quantitative element is introduced through a closer examination of the relationship between pupils’ sense of school belonging and the success, or otherwise of the shared placement. Throughout both phases of the research, there is a focus on discovering how a shared placement affects the pupil and what the outcomes of this arrangement are. The project is also heavily focused on identifying the contextual conditions that either facilitate or inhibit positive outcomes occurring. The findings of the research indicate that shared placements can lead to a variety of outcomes for pupils. When it works well, pupils become more engaged with their education and this has a positive impact on their behaviour and emotional development. However, it is also clear that shared placements can result in undesirable outcomes including further disengagement from the mainstream school. When outcomes were positive, the shared placement increased pupils’ self-efficacy, aspirations and facilitated achievement. These factors were supported by valuing pupil voice, excellent partnership working between settings and the schools willingness to include children with complex needs. This research also highlights that a greater sense of belonging to the mainstream school is associated with an increased likelihood of positive outcomes occurring. This project has explored an area which has been largely neglected in previous research. The theories developed have a variety of implications for Educational Psychologists as well as wider implications, and these are discussed in the final section. Figure 1 presents a visual overview of the research project.

Community colleges continue to experience high levels of student attrition and low degree/certificate completion rates. Given extant literature, there appears to be a need to reexamine how interactions between students and the institution, and students and institutional agents are taking place, with the aim of identifying institutional practices that deleteriously or positively impact degree completion and thus guide colleges to develop action plans to improve conditions for student success. This study examined how factors such as institutional commitment to students, mattering, sense of belonging, interactions with diverse peers, perceptions of the campus climate, engagement/involvement, socio-academic integrative experiences, and goal commitment collectively affected community college students’ intent to persist to degree completion. The proposed model tested the tenability of seven propositions examining how the above constructs interact to influence intent to persist. The sample consisted of 2,088 multiply diverse community college students. The conceptual model was grounded on Astin’s (1991) Input-Environment-Outcome model and was tested in the context of structural equation modeling. Multiple group invariance analyses for race/ethnicity were conducted. The conceptual model explained 28% of the variance on intent to persist for Asian students, 21% for White students, and 19% for Latino/a students. Results indicated that transition support from family/friends exerted the highest effect on intent to persist across all racial/ethnic groups, followed by engagement/involvement, perceptions of mattering, interactions with diverse peers, GPA, goal commitment, and socio-academic integrative experiences, albeit varying by group. This study was the first in the literature to empirically demonstrate a causal effect between institutional commitment to students and perceptions of mattering. Mattering, in turn, exerted a moderate to strong influence on engagement/involvement, socio-academic integrative experiences, sense of belonging, and indirectly on intent to persist. Evidence in support of an omnibus “student development and success” construct, as alluded to by Wolf-Wendel, et al. (2009) is also presented. Of import to these findings is that while this construct explained a significant proportion of the variance for engagement/involvement, belonging, mattering, and interactions with diverse peers, the individual factors exerted an independent effect on intent to persist. Implications for theory, research, and practice are also discussed.

This doctoral thesis centres on children of immigrant background, who live and go to school in a non-urban community. The emphasis is on their narrated experience of a sense of belonging in and out of school. The study is based on interviews with 13 children at two different schools in two small-sized municipalities, and aimed at identifying the factors in their narratives that impact on their sense of belonging as well as the related conditions and means of action. The interviews were conversational and most of the children were interviewed on three occasions.   Each result chapter analyses a specific dilemmatic space related to a sense of belonging, such as peer relationships, trips to the “home country”, and managing in school. In particular, the emotions related to the children’s narrative positionings are analysed as well as the narrative resources employed in their narration.   The results show that their sense of belonging is produced in the interplay between the conditions of immigration and the socio-cultural conditions in the small-sized community. The children describe extensive relational and emotional work to enter into comradeship. Dimensions of being like and unlike gain importance and involve clothing, height and colour of skin. Several of the children describe how they cope with ‘racifying’ and other excluding processes of ‘othering’ on a daily basis. Trips to the home country emerge as central events in their lives and it is clear that a sense of belonging is connected to place attachment and anchored in embodied sensory emotions. Managing school is important to all the children but is attributed different meanings in the pursuit of the long-term goal of employment.   In conclusion, the children’s experiences are discussed in terms of two interwoven and sometimes separate projects emerging in the children's narratives: the Swedishness project and the family project. / Vad innebär det att vara barn med migrationsbakgrund om man bor och går i skolan på en mindre ort? Vad och hur berättar barnen om sin vardag och sina sociala relationer i och utanför skolan? Om dessa frågor handlar den här avhandlingen och det specifika forskningsintresset är känsla av tillhörighet i och utanför skolan. Denna studie bygger på intervjuer med barn med migrationsbakgrund som bor och går i skolan på två mindre orter i Sverige. De har alla erfarenhet av att antingen de själva eller någon av deras föräldrar har brutit upp från det sammanhang där de tidigare levt. Barnen har därmed ofta erfarenhet av att tillhörighet blir något som utmanas. Resultaten visar hur känsla av tillhörighet formas i samspelet mellan migrationens villkor och villkor på den mindre orten. Barnen beskriver ett omfattande relationellt och emotionellt arbete i berättelser om kamratrelationer, resor till hemlandet och om att klara skolan.   Barnens erfarenheter kan ses som relaterade till två tydliga projekt: svenskhetsprojektet och familjeprojektet. Dessa projekt vävs samman i barnens berättelser och svenskhetsprojektet kan både vara och inte vara en viktig del i ett familjeprojekt.

This study examined the self-reported perceptions of post-secondary Aboriginal students who were part of a peer mentoring relationship in the Promoting Aboriginal Community Together (PACT) program at the University of Manitoba. PACT supports Aboriginal students transitioning into university life by providing participants with social and academic development, activities, as well as the opportunity to be mentored by an upper-level Aboriginal student. This study asked whether their participation helped them persist in their academic goals and whether peer mentoring as an engagement strategy affects the sense of belonging to the university. The qualitative research design of this phenomenological study permitted a probing of the interview data documenting the experiences of the ten participants, Aboriginal students who had participated in PACT. Among the ways in which participants benefitted from PACT was expressed in themes such as: opportunity to participate in community with other Aboriginal students, networking, overcoming shyness, and getting academic advice. / May 2016

Thesis advisor: Ana M. Martínez-Alemán / College students today are the most connected and social media savvy generation in the history of higher education (Junco & Cole-Avent, 2008) and maintain constant connections to online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (Clem & Junco, 2015). Social media are now understood as a central component of campus and student life across colleges and universities (Martínez-Alemán & Wartman, 2009). Coinciding with the proliferation of social media use has been a rise in racialized hostilities on online settings. These offenses often target racially minoritized students, and scholars have become increasingly interested in understanding the ways this antagonism on social media impacts college student experiences (Tynes, Rose, & Markoe, 2013), including Asian Americans (Museus & Truong, 2013).         This dissertation uses a critical race theory framework to examine the racialized environment on social media, how Asian American college students experience racialized aggressions, and how their sense of belonging is impacted by racially hostile online encounters. This dissertation addresses the following question: How do encounters with racialized aggressions on social media impact Asian American students’ sense of belonging at a PWI? 29 participants from a predominantly white institution, East Oak University, engaged in individual interviews, participant observations, artifact collection, and focus groups as part of this study. The findings of this study suggest that the encounter of racialized aggressions on social media, especially those on the anonymous platform Yik Yak, are detrimental in facilitating positive sense of belonging among Asian Americans at East Oak. These online racialized encounters are asserted to be rooted in the endemic nature of racism at East Oak, and the claiming of social media as a property that enabled Whites to define and dictate campus culture by engaging in racist discourse. The nature of these online communications speaks to the ways that social media is suggested to influence both sense of belonging and institutional racial climates on today’s college campuses. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

This study seeks to understand ways in which members’ experience a sense of belonging within Sephora’s own commodified community: Beauty Insider. Three research questions are presented, the final one being of highest importance: in which way do members of Beauty Insider experience a sense of belonging? To be able to understand the members, previous research is presented where Muniz & O’Guinn’s (2001) study on Brand Communities is essential, as well as the study conducted by Dholakia et al. (2004) on participation within communities. To better understand what activities members engage in within communities, a theoretical framework based on fan cultures, consumer culture and participatory culture is presented to gain a better understanding of the aspects of a community. This study will approach the research questions mainly using focus group interviews, as well as a necessary description of the discourse content of the platform to better understand the context of the study. The study concludes by presenting a result and an analysis that is, mostly, in line with previous research as well as discovering new aspects of members attitudes towards Beauty Insider and which meaning members experience as a result of participating in different activities within the community.

Although Latina/os are the largest minority group in California and enrolling in higher education in record-breaking numbers (Zarate & Burciaga, 2010), the graduation rate of this group is very low (Kewal-Ramani, Gilbertson, Fox, & Provasnik, 2007). A phenomenological approach was used in this study to explore the lived experiences of Latina/o students at a for-profit college in the Inland Empire. Students from different major fields of study described how they explored and sought college information, how they experienced both community and for-profit colleges, and described their levels of sense of belonging in both community and for-profit colleges. Students shared their experiences reflective of the serpentine pathway of college-conocimiento (Acevedo-Gil, 2017) and the influence of a sense of belonging (Hurtado & Carter, 1997; Hurtado & Ponjuan, 2005; Maestas, Vaquera, & Zehr, 2007) on their persistence in higher education. Findings indicate that Latina/o students have limited college choices, weigh criteria to choose a for-profit college after departing from community colleges to “transfer across,” and feel that they belong in the for-profit institution for reasons that included either feeling cultural congruity with other students, or simply experienced college community support from faculty/ staff. Recommendations include: instructors be assigned as mentors who are personable and exhibit genuine caring; for-profit colleges should be as financially accessible as community colleges for all students; and the personalization available in for-profit colleges should be implemented into the community colleges.

The five stories in this collection are an exploration of realist fiction through a variety of narrative points of view and a diversity of characters. The stories explore issues of class, age, work and family, but in each piece, the characters struggle in their own way to discover a sense of belonging in their own lives. Central to each of these stories is a sense of place. All are set in the American west, most in rural California and the land and activities of place provide not only a specific landscape, but often a limitation, a narrative element against which the characters both resist and find their truest home.

From 2012 to 2015, students' academic performance at a community college in North Carolina fell below North Carolina Community College System baseline benchmarks despite the institution's adoption of several student success initiatives. Building from the established correlation between student academic achievement and academic engagement and the importance of noncognitive competencies in moderating student academic engagement, this qualitative case study investigated the academic experiences of 7 students who were members of the Paying It Forward mentoring program to determine the types of support and resources that students needed to develop and hone intrinsic motivation, sense of belonging, and self-efficacy-the noncognitivenoncognitive competencies proven to most directly moderate academic engagement. The guiding frameworks included a student-engagement framework developed by the Chicago Consortium on School Research, the learner-centered curriculum framework, and the generalized internal/external model. The research questions focused on specific factors that facilitated students' development of intrinsic motivation, sense of belonging, and academic confidence. The findings identified relationships between student academic performance and academic engagement as moderated by these noncognitivenoncognitive competencies and supported previous research concerning the invaluable role of faculty in developing students' sense of belonging. A resulting professional development project may enable faculty to systematically bolster students' academic engagement and performance by directly supporting mastery of these noncognitivenoncognitive competencies. This project may contribute to social change through increased graduation and transfer rates, which would create opportunities for enhanced social capital.