Do I Belong in Law School? The Role of Academic and Social Climate

Abstract

Research on sense of belonging in higher education has been shown to have significant impacts on students’ mental health and academic performance. While a low sense of belonging can have negative impacts on all students, sense of belonging is a factor that varies by student identities, disproportionately impacting some groups over others. Emergent and empirically robust research on legal education, predominantly in the US, UK, and Australia, has found that female, minority, and economically disadvantaged students report much lower levels of ‘sense of belonging’; while some research points to the influence of learning design, the social environment, student motivation and behavior, and the competitive nature of the legal profession. In Europe and elsewhere, there has been a growing concern with law students’ psychological distress, but research is scarce.

To fill this gap, we developed a faculty-wide concurrent mixed methods survey, which was answered by 624 students at the University of Oslo. In this paper, we ask the following questions: (1) to what extent do students experience a sense of belonging; 2) what explains its variation; and 3) how can it be improved? The quantitative responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics and structural equation modelling of 23 independent variables, and 222 open responses were subjected to unsupervised thematic analysis through ChatGPT assistance and human interpretation. In doing so, we examine specifically the influence of four potential explanations of sense of belonging – social identity, social interaction, academic motivation, and cognitive appraisal.

We find a strong variation amongst students with 63% responding that they experience a sense of belonging. A further fifth of students experiences a very basic level of sense of belonging (accepted, valued) while a final fifth of students do not register any sense of belonging.

The quantitative and qualitative analysis suggests that certain social interaction constructs – teacher-student interaction, social learning environment, and sense of competition – are particularly and directly powerful in explaining this variation. In other words, the academic and social climate is central. At the same time, we find that this climate mediates some of the other theorized explanations including social identity (gender, age), academic motivation (personal relevance of study, influence on course design), social interaction (use of writing lab, group rooms and group sofas, faculty employment, grade pressure from others) and partly cognitive appraisal (social media use). In addition, gender is an important determinant of whether students feel comfortable participating in class. These findings are backed up by the qualitative findings, which show a strong student focus on their interactions with students and staff and the value of group spaces. Students suggest several interventions and the direct and indirect findings on academic and social climate point towards research-based interventions for improvement for those that experience a poor sense of belonging.

Keywords: sense of belonging - higher education - legal education - academic climate - structural equation models - ChatGPT