Content area
Full text
Collegiate environments in the United States continue to become increasingly diverse as they relate to social identities such as race, gender, sexuality, and college generation status (Mayhew, Rockenbach, Bowman, Seifert, & Wolniak, 2016; Quaye & Harper, 2015). As student demographics evolve, higher education scholars and practitioners respond accordingly, increasing the knowledge base concerning how individuals experience college differentially based on their social identities. Quaye and Harper (2015) emphasized this point: “A dependency on sameness is no longer appropriate, as contemporary cohorts of students at colleges and universities are different; the ways they experience and respond to our campuses are varied” (p. 1). In reaction to changing populations, extant scholarship has illuminated how campus environments affect student subpopulations in varying ways; these in turn also influence important student outcomes, such as critical thinking, moral development, and persistence, to name a few (see Mayhew et al., 2016). One such outcome that has received attention from higher education scholars is the notion of belonging (e.g., Hausmann, Schofield, & Woods, 2007; Johnson et al., 2007; Museus, Yi, & Saelua, 2017), described as “students’ perceived social support on campus, a feeling or sensation of connectedness, [and] the experience of mattering or feeling cared about, accepted, respected, valued by and important to the group . . . or others on campus” (Strayhorn, 2019, pp. 28–29).
Researchers have highlighted how collegians from marginalized backgrounds experience belongingness differently (Strayhorn, 2019). Notable studies have revealed the variations in belongingness that exist across racial groups (Hausmann et al., 2007; Hurtado & Carter, 1997; Johnson et al., 2007; Museus & Maramba, 2011) and college generation statuses (first-generation versus continuing-generation; Soria & Stebleton, 2012; Stebleton, Soria, & Huesman, 2014). Specifically, this research underscores how colleges fail to create environments that honor some students’ cultural backgrounds, which impacts their belonging in the process (Museus et al., 2017). Understanding generation status or race separately, however, does not fully explain how collegians report their belongingness. In fact, Nguyen and Nguyen (2018) stated that scholarship can “reinforce a narrative by which the [first-generation student] category holds explanatory power without regard to how race, as an example, may also shape the development of cultural capital that bears on the relationships between faculty, students, and space” (p. 160). Since generation status and...