2026-09-26T04:08:11Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/113150 2023-07-11 col_2142_5131 col_2142_8800 com_2142_5130 com_2142_5132

DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #16789 on 2022-01-12 at 12:53:50 Made available in DSpace on 2022-01-12T22:35:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 MAGHSOODI-THESIS-2021.pdf: 943384 bytes, checksum: 3a65e1a40fd934df1faef380d0303225 (MD5) LICENSE.txt: 4211 bytes, checksum: ecda4c4c2cff85f4e37bc6c25851a20d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2021-07-08 Embargo set by: Seth Robbins for item 121076 Lift date: 2024-01-12T22:35:30Z Reason: Author requested U of Illinois access only (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD system Author requested U of Illinois access only (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD system U of I Only Ruedas-Gracia, Nidia Neville, Helen A Xia, Yan Maghsoodi, Amir Homayoon 2022-01-12T22:35:04Z 2022-01-12T22:35:04Z 2024-01-12T22:35:30Z 2021-07-08 2021-08 Sense of belonging is a psychological construct that has been theorized to be a fundamental human need and shown to have important implications in many domains of life, including academic achievement. The Sense of Social and Academic Fit Scale (Walton & Cohen, 2007) has been widely used to assess sense of college belonging among undergraduate college students, particularly to explore academic disparities across lines of gender, social class, and race/ethnicity. Despite its wide use, the instrument’s latent factor structure and measurement invariance properties have not been reported in the published literature to date. Moreover, the need for short measures has led researchers to use subsets of the scale’s items without an established theoretical or statistical basis. Thus, I sought to examine and validate the factor structure of this scale, to analyze its measurement invariance properties across the demographic categories listed above, and to derive and validate a brief measure of college belonging using a subset of the original scale’s items. Single-factor models of the full measure showed poor fit to the data, and inspection of local misfit suggested the presence of multiple correlated factors. Exploratory factor analyses recovered a four-factor model with the following latent factors: Institutional Belonging, Cultural Match, Social Acceptance, and Social Capital. Additionally, a brief five-item measure was derived that matched the Institutional Belonging factor of the full measure. This brief measure explained a substantial amount of the variance from the full measure and showed added benefits, such as external validity in an independent dataset, strict invariance across social class and race/ethnicity, and metric invariance across gender. The other models did not achieve measurement invariance in any category, nor did they show acceptable fit with an independent dataset. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed. Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'U of I Access', the embargo will last until 2023-08-01 The student, Amir Maghsoodi, accepted the attached license on 2021-07-07 at 16:30. The student, Amir Maghsoodi, submitted this Thesis for approval on 2021-07-07 at 16:42. This Thesis was approved for publication on 2021-07-08 at 14:04. application/pdf http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113150 en Copyright 2021 Amir Maghsoodi sense of belonging social fit college students factor analysis scale development measurement invariance Examining the latent structure of Sense of Social and Academic Fit text Thesis Educational Psychology Educational Psychology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Thesis M.S.