Transfronterizx College Students’ Perceptions of Campus Climate and Sense of Belonging

PURPOSE

The purpose of this study was to investigate the variables that best predicted Transfronterizx college students’ sense of on-campus belonging in higher education at the San Diego-Tijuana borderlands. To identify the variables that predicted students’ on-campus sense of belonging, this study also examined their demographic characteristics, student characteristics, transborder interactions, and beliefs about their campus climate. A total of 100 Transfronterizx students (58% female and 42% male) from a four-year higher education institution in the Southwestern region of the United States participated in this study.

PARTICIPANTS

The data for this study was collected during the fall 2015 academic year. A total of 100 students (58% female, 42% male) from a four-year higher education institution located in a border town in the southwestern region of the United States participated in this study. Of these, 81 (81%) were undergraduates, and 19 (19%) were master's students. The mean age of participants was 23.66 years (SD = 5.19), with a range of 18 to 50 years. Overall, 9,000 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate Latinx students were contacted via email to participate in the study. A total of 130 participants completed the questionnaire. However, responses from students who had already graduated or were not living a transborder life during the study period were excluded from the analysis and findings. As a result, only 100 students were included in the final sample.

SITE

The recruitment site for this study was a Hispanic-serving, four-year public higher education institution located in a border town in the southwestern region of the United States. The campus is situated in close proximity to the U.S.-Mexico international border, and campus leaders have engaged in various binational collaboration efforts with non-profit organizations and higher education institutions in Mexico. This institution was selected as the recruitment site due to its proximity to the U.S.-Mexico international border. At the time of this study, the university served approximately 32,000 students. However, there is no record of the number of students who attend the campus and live a transborder life in the U.S.-Mexico region. Researchers explain that, due to the nature of the Transborder population—where many members have dual citizenships and dual domiciles—it is difficult to track the exact number of students who are part of the U.S.-Mexico Transfronterizx community (Chavez Montaño, 2006).

PROCEDURES AND RECRUITMENT

The methodological procedure for this study was descriptive in nature. The recommended sample size for a descriptive study is approximately 100 participants for each major subgroup (Mertens, 2015). In line with this recommendation, 100 students from the higher education institution mentioned above participated in the study.

Upon receiving Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, the consent form and data collection instruments were uploaded to the Qualtrics system for participants to access. A Qualtrics link to the consent form and data collection instruments was included in a recruitment email sent to students via social media outlets, student clubs, and campus organizations.

A total of 130 students from the higher education institution completed the questionnaire; however, 30 responses were excluded because the students did not meet the participant requirements. As a result, only 100 students were included in this study.

INSTRUMENT

The researcher collected quantitative responses about the transborder experiences of college students who live a transborder life through a 30-item questionnaire to address the first and second sub-research questions of this study: (1) What are the demographic and student characteristics of Transfronterizx college students from the U.S.-Mexico Southwest Border Region? and (2) What are Transfronterizx college students’ transborder characteristics and belief levels about living a transborder life?To capture students’ demographic characteristics, the questionnaire included nominal questions about students’ age, race, ethnicity, cultural identification, and academic experiences. It also included nominal questions about students’ transborder interactions, the circumstances that led them to live a transborder life, and their current reasons for continuing to do so. Additionally, two ordinal items measured students’ beliefs about living a transborder life using a Likert scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 4 = strongly agree.

The researcher administered the following subscales from the National Survey of Hispanic Students (NSHS) (Hurtado & Carter, 1997) to address the third and fourth sub-research questions of this study: Sense of Belonging to Campus (SBC), Experienced Discrimination-Exclusion (EDE), and Perceptions of Campus Racial-Ethnic Tension (PCRET). These sub-research questions were: (3) What are Transfronterizx college students’ belief levels about their sense of belonging, experiences of discrimination, and perceptions of racial and ethnic tensions on campus? and (4) What variables are predictive of Transfronterizx college students’ levels of on-campus sense of belonging? The internal consistency of the subscales was as follows: SBC, α = .94; EDE, α = .61; and PCRET, α = .63.

“The NSHS was developed as a comprehensive longitudinal survey of college students’ experiences” (Hurtado & Carter, 1997, p. 332). The focus of the NSHS was to examine students’ early college transition experiences and their perceptions of campus climate. The NSHS was administered in 1990 as part of “a national longitudinal study of Latino college students who were among the top PSAT achievers and were semifinalists for a national scholarship award” (p. 323). Similarly, in this study, the NSHS was administered to Latino undergraduate and graduate students attending the higher education institution mentioned above who lived a transborder life in the U.S.-Mexico Southwest Border region. To examine Transfronterizx college students’ perceptions of their campus climate and sense of belonging to their campus community, this study focused on participants’ responses to the SBC, EDE, and PCRET subscales of the NSHS.