Coined ‘the social cure’, a strong sense of social support has been associated with greater health and well-being (Jetten, Haslam, & Alexander, 2012). However, recent research has suggested that women in physics undergraduate degrees report a lesser sense of belonging on their course, com- pared to men (Seyranian et al., 2018). Consequentially, we hypothesised that, as they are an under- represented group, women in university physics classes may report a lower sense of belonging and well-being, in comparison to men. Similarly, we posited that the link between belonging as part of the physics community and well-being would be weaker for women than it would be for men. We conducted a survey of 310 physics students (105 women, 205 men) from across all undergrad- uate levels at a small research-intensive university. This survey measured students’ identification with physics as a discipline, their sense of belonging, their self-efficacy (the beliefs in their abil- ity to complete physics tasks), and their sense of well-being. Our results revealed that women reported a similar level of belonging and well-being compared to men, but men reported signifi- cantly greater physics identity and self-efficacy than women. Despite this, belonging significantly predicted levels of well-being for men, but this association was not found for women. Therefore, it seems men could be benefitting from the social cure to a greater extent than women in physics. This raises a number of questions for future research: what contexts result in belonging relating to well-being, and is the lack of an association between belonging and well-being prevalent in other under-represented groups in education?
References
Jetten, J., Haslam, C., & Alexander, S. H. (Eds.). (2012). The social cure: Identity, health and well- being. Psychology press.
Seyranian, V., Madva, A., Duong, N., Abramzon, N., Tibbetts, Y., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (2018). The longitudinal effects of STEM identity and gender on flourishing and achievement in college physics. International Journal of STEM Education, 5(1), 1-14.
