As researchers, we’re taught that low response rates are a problem – too few responses reduce statistical power, limit generalisability, and make it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions.
So when my survey on student belonging achieved just 16 responses from 234 students, a response rate of 6.84 per cent, my first reaction was disappointment, because months of planning, ethical approval, and survey design appeared to have produced very little usable data. But once the initial frustration wore off, I started asking a different question. What if the most interesting finding wasn’t the responses I received, but the ones I didn’t?
That shift completely changed how I viewed the project.
The original question
The study was designed to explore whether university induction programmes help students develop a sense of belonging. Belonging has become something of a buzzword in higher education over the past decade, and for good reason – research consistently shows that students who feel connected to their university are more likely to engage with learning, persist through challenges, and successfully complete their studies.
Universities invest significant time and money in induction programmes, welcome weeks, freshers’ events, and transition activities because they’re assumed to help students settle into university life. My survey asked students about their experiences of induction, whether they felt connected to their course, and what had helped or hindered their sense of belonging.
The responses I received were interesting, if unsurprising. Students highlighted the importance of meeting teaching staff, joining societies, and making friendships, while others described barriers including part-time work, financial pressures, anxiety, and struggling to balance competing commitments.
None of these findings challenged the existing literature. The real challenge lay elsewhere.
The missing voices
Of the 234 students invited to participate, 218 chose not to respond – and that’s where the project became much more interesting. Research on student engagement often relies on surveys. We ask students how engaged they feel, whether they feel they belong, and what their experiences of university have been.
But there’s a fundamental problem hiding in plain sight, which is that the students we most want to hear from may be the very students least likely to complete our surveys. If someone already feels disconnected from university – overwhelmed with work, juggling employment, commuting long distances, or questioning whether they belong – completing another institutional questionnaire may not be high on their list of priorities.
In other words, our methods may systematically miss the students whose experiences matter most.
Reading the silence
In research, non-response is usually treated as something to overcome, with researchers discussing incentives, reminder emails, and response bias. But perhaps non-response deserves a little more attention in its own right, because silence isn’t always meaningless.
Students may not respond for countless reasons. Perhaps they never saw the email, or intended to complete it but forgot. Perhaps they were exhausted after working late, or caring for children or family members. Perhaps they felt the survey wouldn’t make any difference – or perhaps they just didn’t trust that anyone was genuinely interested in what they had to say.
Those possibilities are impossible to untangle from survey data alone, yet they remind us that silence shouldn’t automatically be interpreted as indifference. Sometimes silence reflects competing priorities rather than disengagement, sometimes it reflects previous experiences of not being heard, and sometimes it reflects the reality that students have lives far more complex than the neat categories we use to understand them.
The paradox of student voice
Universities rightly place increasing emphasis on student voice. We ask students for module evaluations, course evaluations, National Student Survey responses, pulse surveys, belonging surveys, wellbeing surveys, and engagement surveys – and the intention is positive, because listening to students matters.
But there’s an irony here. Many institutional mechanisms rely on students participating voluntarily, and the students who consistently complete surveys are often those who are already relatively engaged with university life. Meanwhile, students who feel disconnected may fade from the conversation altogether.
This creates a paradox. We rely on surveys to understand disengagement, yet disengagement itself may reduce participation in those very surveys. The result is that institutional understanding risks becoming skewed towards the voices that are easiest to hear.
Measuring isn’t understanding
This project also prompted me to reflect on something bigger than response rates – can belonging really be captured through a questionnaire? Belonging isn’t a fixed characteristic, and it changes over time. A student may feel completely comfortable in one lecture and utterly isolated in another, connected academically but struggling socially, or trusting of one lecturer while feeling invisible within the wider institution.
These experiences are fluid, emotional, and deeply personal, and tick-box surveys inevitably simplify that complexity. That’s not to say surveys have no value – they can identify broad patterns and highlight areas requiring further investigation. But they rarely explain why students feel the way they do, nor do they capture the contradictions that often characterise university life.
The longer I reflected on the study, the more I realised that belonging may be something better explored through conversations than questionnaires.
More than induction
Another reflection concerned induction itself. Universities often treat induction as a single event – students arrive, information is delivered, expectations are explained, and support services are introduced, then everyone moves on. But transition doesn’t work like that. Students continue adjusting throughout their first semester, and often their entire first year, and information shared during welcome week is easily forgotten amid the excitement, anxiety, and information overload of starting university.
Perhaps belonging isn’t created during induction at all. Perhaps it develops gradually through repeated interactions with staff, classmates, and the wider university community – a friendly conversation after class, a lecturer remembering a student’s name, meeting someone with similar interests, or feeling comfortable asking for help. These seemingly ordinary moments may matter far more than any formal induction programme.
Listening differently
The experience has changed how I think about research. I originally approached the project hoping to measure belonging, but instead it encouraged me to think more carefully about how belonging is experienced. Future research might benefit from spending less time asking hundreds of students to complete surveys and more time having meaningful conversations with smaller numbers of students over longer periods.
Interviews, focus groups, reflective diaries, longitudinal studies, and co-produced research all require considerably more time, but they also allow students to explain uncertainty, contradiction, and change in ways surveys simply can’t. Just as significantly, they allow relationships to develop – and if belonging is fundamentally relational, perhaps our research methods should be too.
A reminder for universities
The project also offers a broader lesson for higher education. Universities increasingly rely on measurable indicators of engagement – attendance, learning analytics, survey completion, and participation. These measures are undoubtedly useful, but they aren’t the same as understanding students.
A student who misses induction may be working to pay their rent. A student who never joins a society may be commuting two hours each day. A student who ignores every survey invitation may still care deeply about their education. The absence of visible engagement doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of commitment.
Sometimes students are simply surviving.
What the silence taught me
Looking back, I no longer see the project as a failed survey. Instead, I see it as a reminder that research methods are never neutral – every method amplifies some voices while making others harder to hear. The low response rate forced me to confront an uncomfortable possibility – that our most commonly used approaches to understanding student engagement may systematically overlook the students we most need to understand.
Perhaps that’s the most important finding of all. The survey may not have answered my original research question, but it asked a much better one.
How do we hear the voices of students who never speak?
Until higher education can answer that question, the silence itself remains one of the most important pieces of data we have.
If higher education is serious about understanding belonging, it may need to place less faith in ever more surveys and more in research approaches that build relationships over time. Until then, our evidence base will continue to be shaped by the students who are easiest to hear rather than those we most need to understand.