For some people, a sense of belonging might be a feeling of safety and comfort. For others, it could be the feeling you get when a local shopkeeper knows your name. Belonging might be something that is only missed when it is no longer there.

Feeling that you belong may be a vague concept, but it is an important one – an essential element of the fabric of society and for our wellbeing.

When there is a challenge to that sense of cohesion – when people feel that they don’t belong – this could offer important insights on how people relate to the world around them and whether they feel socially connected to it.

A recent study from a group of Berlin-based researchers focused on developing a scale to measure a challenged sense of belonging, working with refugees and asylum seekers in Germany.

“Questions related to sense of belonging – and, in particular, challenged sense of belonging – are implicitly central to discourses about the fragmentation and loss of cohesion that appears to be in progress in today’s industrialised societies,” says Lena Walther, researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Free University Berlin, and study co-author.

“Within the topic of migration, the relevance of sense of belonging is also immediately apparent: resettlement may erode migrants’ sense of belonging, and regaining it is a major sign that integration into a new society is going well.”

While research on how refugees are integrating into a society tends to focus on measures such as language ability and participation in the labour market, Walther says: “It is possible for someone to be fully structurally integrated and still lack that subjective sense of being a valued part of their environment.”

The paper argues that a sense of belonging is ‘an essential hallmark of social integration and participation’ and that a challenged sense of belonging poses a threat to both. However, this experience has historically been difficult to assess because of the lack of adequate psychometric measures.

The researchers developed a scale drawing on existing measurement instruments, the challenged sense of belonging scale (CSBS), addressing four elements they had identified after reviewing theoretical literature on belonging: connection; participation; identification; and congruence.

These elements formed the basis of the scale:

• I feel disconnected from those around me
• I don’t feel that I participate with anyone or
  any group
• I am troubled by a feeling I have no place in this world
• I feel torn between worlds.

The scale was tested using the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees, a random sample of asylum seekers and refugees who migrated to Germany between 2013 and 2016. The survey, conducted by Kantar, is a joint research project of the German Socio-Economic Panel, the Research Centre of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, and the Institute for Employment Research.

The researchers tested it using the five-point Likert scale (strongly agree to strongly disagree), as this meant respondents could express neither feeling challenged in their sense of belonging nor distinctly not feeling challenged.

The mode used for the research was computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), and questions were presented in German and in the respondents’ chosen language side by side.

Out of the sample, the average age was 33 and most respondents had lived in Germany for about three years.

One challenge was choosing appropriate scale items, says Walther. “This is always challenging, but particularly when the construct you’re trying to capture is, by its very nature, more subjective and open. Three of our scale items come from existing personality psychology scales that get at sense of belonging as a trait that individuals have to different degrees.

“Our conceptualisation of sense of belonging is a different one, but some of the items from these scales were applicable to the more contextually dependent sense of belonging we wanted to address. We came up with the fourth item ourselves. Each item captures a slightly different element of a challenged sense of belonging.”

Establishing validity was also challenging. Did the scale capture what the researchers intended it to capture? It was difficult for them to test this quantitatively when it was the first scale of its kind, explains Walther, so they tested how it related to measures of mental health and social connectedness that they hypothesised would relate to sense of belonging.

The results supported the scale as an applicable measure of challenged sense of belonging in the context of forced migration across languages for English, Arabic and Farsi/Dari.

The study also found that a challenged sense of belonging was not related to the frequency of contact respondents had with other people from their country of origin, suggesting that contact with people from the host society may be more important for a sense of belonging.

In the context of migration, the challenges to a sense of belonging are particularly obvious: if someone feels they do not belong, they may be less likely to integrate well into that society.

However, it is not only in migration that this measurement scale could be applied. Where else could it be used? “Any context in which sense of belonging might be challenged: socioeconomic marginalisation, ethnic and racial marginalisation and discrimination, and other forms of exclusion,” says Walther. “Beyond that, it’s also interesting more broadly to understand an important part of the health of societies: do general populations have sense of belonging?”

Further assessment of the scale is also needed within different contexts. Walther adds: “The scale is brand new and should be critically assessed for internal and external validity within any new contexts to which it is applied.”

Fuchs, LM, Jacobsen, J, Walther, L et al. The Challenged Sense of Belonging Scale (CSBS) — a validation study in English, Arabic, and Farsi/Dari among refugees and asylum seekers in Germany. Meas Instrum Soc Sci 3, 3 ( 2021 ).

This article was first published in the July 2021 issue of Impact.