A simple exercise on belonging helps black college students years later
Black freshmen who participated in the training had higher life satisfaction as young adults
By Sujata Gupta
A simple, one-hour exercise that helps black students feel like they belong in college can pay off. Even a decade later, students who took the training reported higher levels of personal and professional satisfaction than their peers.
The findings, reported April 29 in Science Advances, indicate that benefits from a “social-belonging” intervention endure, says Christopher Rozek, an education researcher at Stanford University who was not involved with this study. Though the study is small, involving a few dozen graduate students from a single university, Rozek says the findings are exciting. “It is the first really long-term follow-up with this sort of intervention.”
Black students entering college, who are aware of negative racial stereotypes and are underrepresented in higher education, can experience uncertainty about belonging, says study coauthor Shannon Brady, a social psychologist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. That uncertainty can cause some black students to see commonplace challenges — a bad grade or a spat with a friend — as a confirmation of those negative feelings. Consequently, such students become less likely to seek help when needed, which can hurt their academic performance and overall well-being. Social-belonging interventions aim to break that negative loop.
In the early to mid-2000s, researchers recruited 92 college freshmen – split almost evenly between black and white students — at a selective East Coast university. Forty-three students in one group read partially fictionalized vignettes from a diverse group of upperclassmen describing how their sense of belonging at school increased over time. The upperclassmen emphasized their efforts to reach out to professors and classmates for help. Participants then wrote an essay reflecting on their own experiences. The 49 students in the control group also read vignettes and wrote an essay, but learned about how upperclassmen adjusted to physical challenges, such as navigating campus and bad weather.