Validity Evidence for Parsimonious Sense of Belonging Scales for Engineering Students

Sense of belonging has substantial evidence of being related to success in engineering and is of high interest to the engineering education field, but validation evidence for sense of belonging measurement scales is sparse. This study presents a suite of validity evidence in several categories for two parallel 4 -item belonging scales; belonging in college and belonging in engineering. Data from over 3600 first-year engineering students in 8 cohorts were used to present internal consistency reliability (Cronbach alpha) evidence as well as validity evidence in 3 categories: respondent engagement validity, convergent validity, and sensitivity to societal contexts. Results are reported for whole group as well as two sets of subgroups of interest to the engineering education field: women/men and underrepresented/non-underrepresented groups. Results showed substantial evidence for both internal consistency reliability (alpha > 0.82 for all time points, all subgroups) as well as multiple strands of validity evidence for all 3 categories for supporting interpretations both whole group as well as by subgroups. Across all results, we conclude that there is substantial evidence supporting validity of interpretations from the two parsimonious sense of belonging scales for first-year engineering students.