Examining the Relationship Between Students’ Perceived Sense of Campus Community and Satisfaction with School Life

Abstract:Based on Boyer’s (1990) principles of community, the purpose of this study was to examine how students’ perceived sense of campus community contributed to explaining their satisfaction with school life. Participants were randomly selected from a student email address list obtained by the Office of Assessment at a mid-size university in the Midwest and were sent an electronic mail message inviting them to participate in the study by completing an on-line questionnaire. Three hundred and thirty students answered a 25-item sense of campus community scale developed by Cheng (2004), who had adopted some questions from Janosik’s (1991) Campus Community Scale and the Brief Multidimensional Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale (Zullig et al., 2005). Multiple regression used six factors from the sense of campus community scale (Teaching and Learning, Residential Experience, Diversity and Acceptance, History and Tradition, Loneliness and Stress, and Socialization Across Backgrounds) to predict satisfaction with school life. The overall regression equation was significant (F=38.20, p<.001) and the linear combination of predictor variables explained 45.6% of the variance in students’ satisfaction with their school life. The article also discusses implications of these findings for student affairs practitioners and suggestions for future research in the context of the limitations of the study.