Institutional support, relationships, and multicultural participation: response surfaces of university belonging and sociocultural engagement

Universities are cultural settings in which institutional arrangements and interpersonal recognition jointly condition participation and belonging.

This open-data secondary analysis examined how perceived supportive campus environment and relationship quality combined in relation to university belonging and sociocultural engagement among health-professions students at a culturally diverse university in the United Arab Emirates. The released dataset contained 683 records; 661 complete cases entered both polynomial models. Predictors were transformed to proportion-of-maximum-possible scores. Inference combined 2,000 bootstrap resamples, HC3 heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors, duplicate-record checks, and Cook's D influence sensitivity.

The models explained 47.3% of belonging and 25.6% of sociocultural engagement. The joint-resource slope was positive for belonging [a1 = 3.159, 95% bootstrap CI (2.596, 3.602)] and sociocultural engagement [a1 = 1.721, CI (1.233, 2.133)]. Curvature, directional difference, and mismatch curvature were not consistently supported. Removing two exact duplicate records or 41 observations above Cook's D>4/n retained the positive joint-resource pattern.

Thus, stronger institutional support and relationships were jointly associated with both campus belonging and multicultural participation, without evidence for a unique matching effect. The cross-sectional measures do not directly observe identity co-construction, so the contribution is a bounded quantitative account of conditions associated with culturally situated participation and belonging.