To what extent do responses to a single survey question provide insights into students' sense of belonging?

A student's "sense of belonging" is critical to retention and success in higher education. However, belonging is a multifaceted and dynamic concept, making monitoring and supporting it with timely action challenging. Conventional approaches to researching belonging depend on lengthy surveys and/or focus groups, and while often insightful, these are resource-intensive, slow, and cannot be repeated too often. "Belonging Analytics" is an emerging concept pointing to the potential of learning analytics to address this challenge, and to illustrate this concept, this paper investigates the feasibility of asking students a single question about what promotes their sense of belonging. To validate this, responses were analysed using a form of topic modelling, and these were triangulated by examining alignment with (i) students' responses to Likert scale items in a belonging scale and (ii) the literature on the drivers of belonging. These alignments support our proposal that this is a practical tool to gain timely insight into a cohort's sense of belonging. Reflecting our focus on practical tools, the approach is implemented using analytics products readily available to educational institutions — Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) and Statistical Program for Social Sciences (SPSS).