Culture, Not Just Connection: Why School Belonging Research Is Too WEIRD to Be Universal

Across the world, an alarming number of students feel like strangers in their own schools. According to data from the OECD’s PISA programme, roughly one in five students reports feeling like an outsider at school, and one in six reports feeling lonely. In countries such as Russia and the Philippines, the picture is even bleaker, with about one in four students reporting social isolation. Compounding the problem, international large-scale studies indicate that students’ sense of school belonging has been deteriorating over recent decades, with disadvantaged students bearing the heaviest burden. School belonging—the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported in the school social environment—has long been linked to higher well-being, stronger academic motivation, greater engagement, and better achievement, making its global decline a pressing scientific and policy concern.

A new commentary published in Educational Psychology Review by Ronnel B. King of The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Faming Wang of Zhejiang University argues that the scientific field charged with understanding this problem is itself profoundly unbalanced. In their analysis of a topical collection on school belonging curated by Christopher S. Rozek and Carlton J. Fong, the authors acknowledge genuine advances—including new conceptual frameworks, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses showing how belonging is shaped by racialized climates, classroom motivation processes, gendered patterns, institutional policies, spatial arrangements, cultural beliefs, and peer cultures. Yet they contend that the entire evidence base rests on a strikingly narrow geographic foundation, one dominated by what psychologists call WEIRD societies: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic contexts.

The technical scale of this imbalance is difficult to overstate. Drawing on three established cultural taxonomies—Schwartz’s values framework, Inglehart and Welzel’s cultural map, and the United Nations regional classification—the authors mapped the locations of studies in the collection’s systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Across K–12 STEM classrooms, postsecondary settings, and studies of school racial climate, the vast majority of empirical work is anchored in the United States and a small cluster of other WEIRD countries, with only scattered studies from non-WEIRD contexts such as Turkey, the Philippines, South Africa, China, and Ethiopia. Entire world regions, including much of Latin America, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, are virtually absent from the cumulative record. Even the two most comprehensive quantitative syntheses of school belonging in K–12 settings reproduce this skew, relying overwhelmingly on samples from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Western Europe.

As the authors point out, extrapolating conclusions from studies based on roughly 12 percent of the world’s population to the remaining 88 percent risks mistaking culturally situated patterns for universal principles. This matters because theories derived from settings marked by affluence, political stability, and individualism may simply fail to capture the conditions students face in contexts shaped by economic precarity, societal conflict, natural disasters, colonial legacies, or highly stratified educational systems. The commentary also highlights an imbalance in the power structures surrounding research itself: the infrastructure needed to produce psychological science is often absent in Global South societies, reinforcing a cycle in which the questions asked, the samples studied, and the conclusions drawn all default to WEIRD assumptions.

The authors’ analytical framework identifies three distinct channels through which culture can shape school belonging, and their re-analysis of the PISA 2018 dataset illustrates each. The first is level-oriented difference: countries vary dramatically in average belonging, with nations such as Spain and Austria scoring above the OECD average, while Russia, Brunei Darussalam, and the Philippines fall alarmingly below it. These rankings can help policymakers pinpoint where interventions are most urgently needed. The second is structure-oriented difference: the association between belonging and other constructs varies across cultures. Although school belonging predicted better academic achievement in nearly every country examined, the strength of that correlation differed significantly. Consistent with this, earlier work by Goodenow and Grady found belonging was more strongly tied to academic outcomes among Latine students than among Black and White students, while a meta-analysis by Yuen and Wu showed that the link between belonging and psychological well-being was stronger in individualistic than in collectivist cultures.

The third and most radical channel is meaning-oriented difference. Much belonging research adopts what cross-cultural psychologists call an etic approach, testing Western-derived concepts worldwide through translated instruments that assume conceptual equivalence. The commentary argues for embracing emic approaches—recovering culture-specific meanings. Drawing on Li’s landmark prototype analysis of learning, which found that Americans conceptualize learning primarily as a cognitive process while Chinese students associate it with social and moral development, the authors show how simply translating Western scales can miss profound differences. In Confucian-influenced cultures, constructs such as ren (humaneness) and he (harmony) suggest belonging may be experienced less as personal fit and more as fulfilling roles, maintaining harmony, and being a morally responsible group member. Philippine indigenous psychology offers kapwa, a shared inner self implying that belonging is mutual care within a moral community; southern African ubuntu and Japanese wa and amae point in similarly relational directions. A student who rarely speaks in class may be enacting belonging through restraint rather than disengagement—something Western measures of overt participation could never detect.

The commentary also pushes the field to widen what counts as culture beyond nationality and race, treating religion, region, and social class as cultural ecologies in their own right. Religious communities organize authority, gender roles, and moral obligation in distinct ways, creating tensions for Muslim students in secularizing Western Europe or non-Christian students in faith-based schools. Regional cultures matter too: research on cultures of honor in the U.S. South links norms of reputation and retaliation to school safety, while Greenfield’s gemeinschaft–gesellschaft framework illuminates the dislocation felt by rural students—whether in the Philippines, Vietnam, or Aboriginal Australia—who cross into urban schools valorizing assertiveness and cosmopolitan habits. Social class, meanwhile, functions not merely as a demographic risk factor but as a system of culturally shaped norms; working-class and first-generation students often bring communal, prevention-focused motivations into institutions that implicitly reward independent, promotion-focused goals, generating a cultural mismatch that quietly erodes belonging.

Culture also operates across nested levels, from individual values and classroom peer norms through school climate and national value orientations to global ideologies of meritocracy and neoliberalism. The authors’ own ecological analysis of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions found that countries higher in power distance reported lower school belonging, while individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and indulgence showed weaker positive associations. Crucially, the commentary warns that theories developed in postmaterialist societies—preoccupied with self-actualization and subjective fit—may be tone-deaf to more basic belonging concerns elsewhere: whether schools can reliably serve their students amid conflict, corruption, earthquakes, typhoons, and floods. UNICEF estimates that extreme climate events disrupted the education of at least 242 million students across 85 countries in 2024 alone, yet such disruptions are virtually absent from mainstream belonging research.

From this diagnosis flows a concrete methodological program. The authors recommend broader cross-cultural sampling, ideally spanning seven or more countries across the world’s major cultural regions, and note that existing resources like PISA and TIMSS make this more feasible than many researchers assume. They call for explicit specification of multilevel models—single-level, cross-level direct effects, or cross-level moderated effects—so that the level of culture being theorized is always clear. They urge rigorous attention to measurement invariance, arguing that cross-cultural mean comparisons are untenable unless researchers demonstrate that instruments measure the same construct across groups through sequential tests of configural, metric, and scalar equivalence, while cautioning that conventional invariance cutoffs may be unrealistic when many cultures are included. Finally, they advocate methodological pluralism, including qualitative and mixed methods to surface emic meanings and cultural manipulation experiments—such as priming independent or interdependent self-construals—that can establish causal roles for specific cultural elements that purely correlational designs cannot.

The stakes of this agenda extend well beyond academic housekeeping. Culturally responsive interventions cannot be exported wholesale from U.S. universities; asset-based pedagogies affirming students’ languages and communities, culturally sustaining approaches that remove the trade-off between authenticity and belonging, and institutional assessments of belonging affordances all point toward designs rooted in local realities rather than one-size-fits-all models. The authors are equally emphatic that a cultural lens should deepen rather than displace intersectional analysis of race, gender, class, disability, sexuality, and migration status—since what it means to be racialized, gendered, or poor varies dramatically across societies with different histories of slavery, colonialism, and stratification. Counteracting WEIRD bias, they conclude, will require more equitable collaborations with Global South scholars, investment in diverse research settings, and treating local knowledge as central to theory building. Because the need to belong may be a universal human motive, but the meaning of belonging is not, students everywhere deserve a science built with the whole world in view.

Subject of Research: Cultural and cross-cultural influences on students' sense of school belonging

Article Title: Culture and school belonging: Towards a global research agenda

Article References: King, R. B., & Wang, F. (2026). Culture and school belonging: Towards a global research agenda. Educational Psychology Review, 38(1), Article 121. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-026-10213-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10648-026-10213-9

Keywords: school belonging, WEIRD bias, cross-cultural psychology, educational psychology, PISA, measurement invariance, emic constructs, intersectionality, social class, culture, Global South, research methods