Support and Relationships Together Drive University Belonging, Study Finds

Universities are more than teaching factories. They are cultural arenas where institutional arrangements and everyday interpersonal recognition jointly determine whether students feel accepted and whether they participate across cultural lines. A new secondary analysis published in Frontiers in Psychology examined how perceived campus support and relationship quality combine in shaping university belonging and sociocultural engagement among health-professions students at a culturally diverse university in the United Arab Emirates. The findings suggest that the strongest outcomes occur when both layers of campus life are favorable, without any evidence that matching the two resources at equal levels confers a special benefit.

The study drew on openly released survey data collected at Gulf Medical University in Ajman, a health-professions institution whose student body reportedly spans 77 nationalities. Students in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, and health-sciences programs completed an anonymous online questionnaire between late October and mid-November 2023. The released dataset contained 683 records, of which 661 complete cases entered the statistical models. The researchers transformed both predictors to proportion-of-maximum-possible scores, placing supportive campus environment and relationship quality on a comparable zero-to-one metric before centering them at 0.50.

Four constructs anchored the analysis. Supportive campus environment was measured with eight items covering academic support, learning services, cross-background contact, social involvement, wellbeing, nonacademic responsibilities, campus participation, and engagement with social or political issues. Relationship quality was assessed with four items about peers, faculty, academic advisors, and administrative staff. University belonging, the primary outcome, captured fit, welcome, pride, positive attachment, and the university as a favored place. Sociocultural engagement, the secondary outcome, combined eight cross-cultural interaction items with five sociocultural adaptation items. Internal consistency was high across all composites, with Cronbach’s alpha ranging from 0.922 to 0.956.

The methodological centerpiece was response surface analysis, a polynomial regression technique that retains both predictors, their squared terms, and their interaction. This approach allows the fitted surface to be interpreted along theoretically meaningful lines rather than collapsing two resources into a single difference score, which can be statistically ambiguous. Four surface parameters were estimated: the joint-resource slope, joint curvature along the congruence line, directional difference along the incongruence line, and mismatch curvature. Inference combined 2,000 bootstrap resamples, HC3 heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors, duplicate-record checks, and Cook’s D influence sensitivity.

The results were striking. The primary belonging model explained 47.3 percent of the variance, while the secondary sociocultural engagement model explained 25.6 percent. For belonging, the joint-resource slope was positive at 3.159 with a 95 percent bootstrap confidence interval of 2.596 to 3.602. For sociocultural engagement, the joint slope was 1.721 with a confidence interval of 1.233 to 2.133. In both cases, the outcome rose as both resources increased together. Curvature, directional difference, and mismatch curvature were not consistently supported by the bootstrap intervals.

This pattern carries a specific theoretical meaning. A matching interpretation would imply that equal levels of institutional support and relationship quality are valuable even when both are low, or that imbalance between the two is harmful beyond their absolute levels. The observed surface does not justify either claim. Instead, institutional and interpersonal resources appear to contribute in parallel, accumulating rather than requiring alignment. The most defensible description is a cumulative resource gradient, not a special benefit of equality between the two layers.

Robustness checks reinforced the central finding. Removing two exact duplicate records produced nearly identical results, with the belonging joint slope at 3.163 and the sociocultural engagement slope at 1.716. Removing 41 observations flagged by Cook’s D above the 4/n threshold retained a strong positive joint slope of 2.915 for belonging and 1.390 for sociocultural engagement. Curvature estimates proved influence-sensitive and should not be emphasized, but the core joint-resource pattern was stable across all sensitivity analyses.

The culturally diverse UAE context strengthens the relevance of these findings without supporting overgeneralization. The sociocultural engagement items directly capture interaction across cultural, ethnic, religious, and economic difference, perspective taking, communication adaptation, and learning about oneself through others. That makes the secondary outcome more proximal to multicultural participation than belonging alone. However, the cross-sectional measures do not directly observe identity co-construction, so the contribution is a bounded quantitative account of conditions associated with culturally situated participation rather than a claim about dynamic identity transformation.

For university administrators, the results support a concrete two-layer diagnostic rather than a generic call to increase belonging. A program can administer a brief, repeated pulse survey of perceived campus support and relationship quality, inspect the two scores separately, and target the weaker layer first. A cohort with easy access to tutoring and wellbeing services but low relationship quality would call for stable faculty-adviser assignments, scheduled small-group check-ins, peer mentoring, and faculty development on respectful feedback. Conversely, strong peer ties but low perceived support would call for clearer service navigation and removal of administrative access barriers. Because no mismatch penalty was detected, either layer can be improved first, though progress should ultimately be tracked across both.

The study also illustrates what transparent open-data secondary research can contribute. The authors reported a discrepancy between the released file’s 683 records and the linked article’s reported 638, choosing to preserve rather than silently reconcile the difference. This practice makes the inferential chain auditable and underscores that dataset reuse does not eliminate the need for provenance checks. Longitudinal and multi-institutional work remains necessary to test how students and institutional cultures shape one another over time, but the present evidence narrows the claims the data can sustain while supporting a clear practical message: belonging and multicultural participation rise together when both institutional support and relationship quality are strong.

Subject of Research: Response surface analysis of university belonging and sociocultural engagement among health-professions students in the UAE

Article Title: Institutional support, relationships, and multicultural participation: response surfaces of university belonging and sociocultural engagement

Article References: Luo, S., & Qu, H. (2026). Institutional support, relationships, and multicultural participation: response surfaces of university belonging and sociocultural engagement. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1950905. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1950905

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1950905

Keywords: university belonging, response surface analysis, campus environment, relationship quality, sociocultural engagement, multicultural participation, health-professions education, open data, cultural psychology, United Arab Emirates, polynomial regression, student engagement