Social Ties and Student Lives Project

The Social Ties and Student Lives Project has been running since January 2025 and uses a mixed-methods research approach, including a questionnaire that incorporates the new Imperial Social Capital Questionnaire, alongside the Imperial College London’s Sense of Belonging Scale, which we developed in 2019.

This project builds upon the research team’s prior work (Belonging, Engagement and Community project, Imperial Bursary Project) which has fundamentally improved our empirical and theoretical understanding of students’ sense of belonging at Imperial, and the challenges experienced by all students from all levels of study, including the challenges and barriers that are more pronounced for students from financially disadvantaged backgrounds (Cohen & Viola, 2021; Viola, 2021; Viola & Cohen, 2023). 

The importance of connection and social capital  has arisen from the data collected from this previous research, and is the impetus for this new project to investigate the research question, What is the relationship between social capital and belonging, engagement, and the academic, and social experiences of Imperial students?

Our operational definition of social capital is based on the OECD definition: “networks together with shared norms, values and understandings that facilitates cooperation within or among groups” (Office for National Statistics (ONS), 2021). This can be seen in four main aspects, which will be investigated in this study:

• personal relationships
• social network support
• civic engagement
• trust and cooperative norms

This new study is fundamentally aligned with Imperial’s regulatory reporting requirements (for example, the Access and Participation Plan [APP], Teaching Excellence Framework [TEF]). There have also been links drawn between sense of belonging and social capital in the research literature (Ahn & Davis, 2020).

Using a mixed-methods approach, this study aims to understand the impact of social capital on the belonging, engagement, and broader student experience at Imperial and in so doing will also provide data to evaluate Imperial’s initiatives and strategies and may contribute to institutional reporting requirements such as our Access and Participation Plan.

Research methods

This study uses mixed methods. A questionnaire, which is administered annually from mid-February to mid-March, and semi-structured interviews with students from all levels of study.

The questionnaire is comprised of two parts: the new Social Capital Questionnaire for Imperial, and the Imperial Sense of Belonging Scale, which we use to capture point-in-time data about Imperial students’ experiences once per year. The responses from the questionnaire then inform the qualitative data collection, where these topics will be explored in more detail through interviews.

References:

Ahn, M. Y., & Davis, H. H. (2020). Sense of belonging as an indicator of social capital. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 40(7/8), 627-642.

Cohen, E., & Viola, J.K. (2022). The role of pedagogy and the curriculum in university students' sense of belonging. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 19(4). https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol19/iss4/06.  (Open Access)

Office for National Statistics (ONS). (2021, July 17). Social capital harmonised standard. Retrieved October 2024, from Government Analysis Function: https://analysisfunction.civilservice.gov.uk/policy-store/social-capital/

Viola, J.K. (2021). Belonging and global citizenship in a STEM university. Education Sciences 11(12), 803.  https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11120803.  (Open Access)

Viola, J. K., & Cohen, E. (2023). Reflections on the walking interview approach to examining university students' sense of belonging. In Academic Belonging in Higher Education (pp. 183-197). Routledge.

Last updated February 2025