Belonging: a review of conceptual issues, an integrative framework, and directions for future research

The tidy-up — four components of belonging, and an honest account of how badly the field has defined its own term.

Allen, Kern, Rozek, McInerney & Slavich (2021). Australian Journal of Psychology 73(1), 87–102. Read it.

Primary reading — read it before the lecture that sets it.

The field has used belonging to mean a feeling, a need, a relationship and a place, often in the same paper. This review separates four components — competencies, opportunities, motivations, and perceptions — and argues that most disagreements in the literature are two people measuring different ones.

Week 12 is the last lecture and you present your proposal for a good place. Use this framework to say precisely what your proposed place supplies: a place can create opportunities and still fail because nobody there has the competencies, or can be full of motivated people with nowhere to put them. Being able to name which of the four your design targets is most of the difference between a proposal and a wish.