What Makes Teenagers Feel They Belong at Faith-Based Schools? Students Reveal the Answer

A sense of belonging is one of the strongest predictors of adolescent wellbeing, academic persistence, and long-term mental health, yet it remains one of the hardest things for schools to engineer. A new qualitative study published in BMC Psychology by Beyza Nur Turgut of Sakarya University, Hasan Batmaz of Karabuk University, and Eyüp Çelik of Sakarya University offers an unusually detailed map of how teenagers themselves experience belonging inside faith-based educational institutions. Rather than measuring belonging through standardized questionnaires, the researchers sat down with 78 students and asked them, in their own words, what made them feel connected to their school and what made them feel like outsiders. The results complicate the simple assumption that a shared religious identity automatically produces a cohesive student body.

The study group consisted of 78 students with a mean age of 15.74 years and a standard deviation of 1.09, comprising 48 girls and 30 boys. Data were collected through a semi-structured interview form designed to probe multiple dimensions of school perception, including how students described their sense of belonging, which environmental factors strengthened or weakened it, and what they believed their schools could improve. The researchers adopted a qualitative design deliberately, because belonging is a subjective construct that quantitative scales often flatten. By letting students narrate their own experiences, the team captured contradictions and ambivalences that a Likert-scale survey would have smoothed away, including the uncomfortable finding that some students experienced religious practices under duress.

The clearest pattern to emerge concerns relationships. Positive peer relationships and sincere teacher-student bonds formed the core of school belonging across nearly all accounts. Students who described having at least one teacher they could approach with personal problems consistently reported a stronger attachment to the institution, while those whose interactions with teachers were limited to academic correction described school as a place they merely attended. This aligns with a broader body of developmental psychology showing that adolescents calibrate their attachment to institutions through the quality of individual relationships within them, not through institutional mission statements or shared ideology. In faith-based schools, where values alignment is often assumed to do the binding work, the students pointed instead to the mundane mechanics of being treated with warmth.

Enrollment motivation turned out to be a powerful accelerant or barrier depending on who made the choice. Students who had chosen the school voluntarily reported that belonging developed quickly, sometimes within the first months, because their initial commitment gave everyday difficulties a positive interpretation. Students enrolled under family pressure described the opposite trajectory: a prolonged sense of alienation that, for some, softened over time as friendships formed, but for others persisted throughout their schooling. This distinction has practical weight for admissions and orientation programs, since the study suggests that a student’s narrative about why they are in the building shapes how they interpret everything that happens inside it.

The negative forces were equally specific. Bullying, social exclusion, and cultural or linguistic differences all hindered adaptation, and students from minority backgrounds within the school described a double burden of fitting in socially while also navigating an environment calibrated to the majority’s cultural and religious norms. The authors found that the school’s religious structure and its academic support systems positively influenced belonging for many students, providing shared rituals and clear expectations that some participants experienced as anchoring. But the same religious atmosphere was experienced as oppressive by others, and some participants reported performing religious practices under duress rather than genuine conviction. The study does not treat religiosity as inherently cohesive or inherently coercive; instead, it documents how the same institutional feature can function differently depending on a student’s position within it.

Physical and curricular factors mattered more than school administrators might expect. Inadequate sports and social activity facilities weakened the bond between students and their schools, particularly for students whose primary social identity was built around teams, clubs, or informal gatherings rather than classroom performance. High academic pressure emerged as another corrosive force, with students describing environments where the intensity of examination expectations crowded out the relaxed social contact through which friendships form. Negative teacher attitudes, including perceived favoritism and dismissiveness, appeared repeatedly in accounts of weak belonging. The researchers also documented a genuine split in how students perceived disciplinary practices: some favored flexibility and saw strict rules as alienating, while others associated firm discipline with safety, predictability, and a stronger sense of membership in the community.

Methodologically, the study follows the standards expected of qualitative research in psychology. Ethical approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee of Karabuk University under approval number 59, dated April 25, 2025, and the work was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent was obtained from all participants, and for those under 16, written parental or guardian consent was secured in addition to the participants’ own assent. The interview protocol, published as an appendix to the open-access article, consisted of three open questions covering the student’s description of belonging, the environmental factors that shaped it, and suggested improvements. The article was received on February 5, 2026, accepted on August 3, 2026, and published on September 18, 2026, as an open-access paper under a Creative Commons license.

The findings arrive at a moment when educators internationally are rethinking how school climate is measured and managed. School belonging has been linked in prior research to lower rates of depression and anxiety, better attendance, and reduced dropout risk, and faith-based schools represent a substantial and growing sector in many countries. The Turkish context of this study adds a valuable data point, since much of the belonging literature is built on secular public schools in North America and Western Europe. The study’s suggestion that shared religious identity is neither necessary nor sufficient for belonging challenges both critics and defenders of faith-based education to look past ideology and examine the relational and infrastructural details that students actually notice.

The authors’ conclusions translate directly into recommendations. To strengthen belonging, faith-based schools should prioritize reinforcing social relationships, improving teacher communication, and upgrading physical and social infrastructure, including sports and activity spaces. They also call for targeted interventions to mitigate the negative impacts of cultural differences and exclusionary social behaviors, which the data show fall hardest on students who differ linguistically or culturally from the school’s majority. The disciplinary finding implies that schools should avoid one-size-fits-all behavior policies, since students experience the same rules through different psychological lenses. None of these recommendations require doctrinal change; they require attention to the ordinary texture of daily school life.

What makes this study resonate beyond its immediate setting is its insistence on listening to the people the system is built for. Students in this sample did not describe belonging as an abstract feeling of shared faith or institutional pride. They described it as a friend who saved them a seat, a teacher who noticed when they were struggling, a gym where they could play after class, and the absence of classmates who mocked their accent. For researchers, the study offers a grounded taxonomy of belonging factors in a understudied school type. For school leaders, it is a reminder that the cheapest and most effective interventions may be relational rather than structural, and that the students most at risk of alienation are often the ones whose enrollment was never their own choice.

Subject of Research: Student perceptions of school climate and belonging in faith-based schools

Article Title: Students’ perceptions of school climate factors supporting school belonging in faith-based schools: a qualitative study

Article References: Turgut, B. N., Batmaz, H., & Çelik, E. (2026). Students’ perceptions of school climate factors supporting school belonging in faith-based schools: a qualitative study. BMC Psychology, 14(1), Article 1388. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05307-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05307-6

Keywords: school belonging, faith-based schools, school climate, teacher-student relationships, qualitative research, adolescent psychology, peer relationships, bullying, religious education, BMC Psychology, student wellbeing, inclusive education