This document summarizes qualitative research on students who live at home while attending university, termed "stayeducation". The researchers interviewed three such students - Isi, Paola, and Kuura - using biographic narrative interviews. They found that these students experience university integration differently than those living on campus. Their lives at home, family relationships, and pre-university backgrounds significantly influence their sense of belonging at university. The researchers argue higher education models should better account for students' home and community contexts to improve support for stayeducation students.

1. ‘of the college don’t push it forward, how are people
going to get to know each other? You just don’t..
HELEN POKORNY – WESTMINSTER BUSINESS SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER, LONDON
DEBBIE HOLLEY, CENTRE FOR EXCELLENCE IN LEARNING, BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY.
SUZANNE KANE – SALFORD BUSINESS SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY OF SALFORD, GREATER
MANCHESTER
TWITTER@CEL_BU

2. The research
 Focus: Challenging the accepted home-university model of
transition
 Arguing that: as with stay-at-home holidays, or ‘staycations’, of
such crucial importance to the tourism industry, so stay-at-
home students are vital to higher education and the term
utilised here is ‘stayeducation’.
 Sample: full-time, first year students (attending different
universities) who live at home (within the greater london area)
with partners or families
 Method: biographic narrative interview method (BNIM)

3. Background
 The researchers have all been employees at universities in London for a
number of years.
 They have all attended training in BNIM with tom wengraf
 This is an ongoing project with other colleagues, which has resulted in a
previous quantitative paper (International journal of management
education 2014), which estimated that 10-15% of students failed to develop
a sense of belonging when engaging with University life, and that these
students were most at risk of leaving the course.
 This section of the research concentrates on the qualitative perspective (VIA
BNIM)

4. Challenging the accepted home-university
model of transition and focusing on
‘stayeducation’
 Concepts of academic and social engagement (Tinto 1975) are linked
with strategies for successful retention (Thomas 2012), and Chow &
Healy (2008) write of students leaving home to inhabit the university
environment and develop new relationships with cohabitees.
 Our empirical work considers the differences in experiencing the
university environment through The concept of ‘stayeducation’ which
acknowledges the significant influences of family and community on the
student experience, particularly for those who continue to inhabit the
family home.

5. Why BNIM?
The qualitative perspective
 The quantitative survey (n=1346) left key questions unanswered:
 what was happening in the lives of students as they transitioned from home to
University?
 In particular, our study was interested in those who remained living in the
family home.
 In the UK around 25% of students remain in their family home; a trend
replicated widely across international contexts (Wojtas, 2014); and set to rise
in the UK to 50% by 2020 (Taylor, 2011).
 BNIM draws out the narrative of lives (wengraf 2001)
 Bnim approach supported a single question for the start of each interview
(Single Question to initiate narrative – SQUIN)

6. The sample
profiles and cross case analysis
1
Source images 1,2,3 – see reference list

7. Isi (attending a pre-1992 research intensive university)
 Isi is a young working class Asian man with He has a sharp and combative
narrative style.
 His life history unfolds trauma, drug misuse and hospital admission.
 University is a way of escaping his past life, and reinventing himself, as well
as a strategy for avoiding the local gym, where his troubles began.
 He is looking for new spaces to inhabit, however, this is difficult as he still
needs to live at home.
They don’t know I’m from a council estate but they
never make me feel like it but it’s just you get that inner
feeling, it’s just instinct. It’s something you can’t
control…It’s not something coming directly to you, it’s
just something that you developed inside yourself from
coming from such a poor background and building
yourself up to here.

8. Paola (attending a post-1992 vocationally focused
university)
 Paola is a 27 year old, married Brazilian woman who lives with her husband.
 She frequently labels herself as a mature student.
 Her decision to study at her university was made on limited information, based in part
on its location in the prestigious Square Mile in the financial district.
So they are really not interested…you see the
girls around looking at the bags and they
want to buy bags and shoes. How many
shoes do you have? I’ve been into that
already you know. I’ve lived that already and
now I am more focused.

9. Kuura (attending a post-1992 vocationally focused
university)
 Kuura is a young female of African/Gambian parents.
 She presents as very articulate and self-assured, with clear views on her academic
journey/career plans. She came from a school with low levels of academic attainment.
 Despite her excellent grades Kuura elects to attend a post 1992 institution of lower
status than others for which she was qualified.
So when people hear about that school,
they don’t really expect anything good
out of that place. I got like 5 A stars, 6 As
and and 2 Es. And nobody believed me,
even my brother was like you little liar,
you couldn't have got that.

10. Cross case analysis A: Similarities of Kuura and Paola contrasted with Isi
KuuRA & PAOLA - Belonging and family/friends
 Both women share a desire for the warmth of family life.
 Kuura in the present and Paola echoing back to her Brazilian roots.
 These family and social influences militate against them making positive choices
 Kuura sees her university as replicating the familiarity and comfort of her family.
 Paola is disappointed with her choice. She decided to go to university after working in the City.
 Both women are very engaged with their studies but exhibit different manifestations of belonging.
 What unites them is a sense of their unexplored potential and “little lives” - lives that might have been different had they made
different choices.
ISI - In contrast…..
 Isi despite a chaotic and confused life history, and working class roots has a ‘big’ sense of life and expectations.
 He has sought out good mentoring and guidance in terms of his university selection and future career.
 He recognises the limitations of his patchy family support and is keen to draw a line under his ‘council estate’ upbringing.
 He is pained by his realisation that if he goes back to his community and his friends he will be unable to fulfil his ambitions for
a “big life”.
 This innate association of his past being wasted coincides with Bourdieu’s concept that ‘self-improvement …presupposes a
personal cost’ (Bourdieu, 1983, 244).

11. Cross case analysis B: Similarities of Kuura and Isi contrasted with Paola
Kuura and Isi - Belonging and social class/community
 Both Kuura and Isi share an acute awareness of social class and their community roots.
 This can be seen from Kuura’s discomfort at a public prize giving when she realised other students were from private
schools.
 When starting at university Isi does not mention his council estate origins to any of his new friends.
 Both are keen to make friends but their background plays out in very different ways.
 For Kuura her narration is one where her university life tumbles out and mixes with her home and community life.
 Isi by contrast sees his new friends as a way of building networks for the future. He is very aware of the social status of the contexts
within which he makes friends and keeps them separate from his home community.
Paola – in contrast…
 Paola has no UK community affiliations.
 She is concerned with the status of her institution, which she compares unfavourable with universities in Brazil, and does not see
herself as belonging.
 The natural group formation of ‘collective preferences’ (Dixon and Durrheim, 2004) cannot accommodate students such as Paola. This
is due to the limited number of peers she feels a close connection to at her chosen institution.

12. Cross case analysis c: Similarities of Paola and Isi contrasted with Kuura
Paola and Isi - Belonging and ethnic boundaries
 Reay et al. (2010) state the importance of ‘cross-racial interactions’ for higher sense of belonging on campus. When Isi
narrates his university experience he expresses a continuous awareness of cultural, ethnic and class
distinctions/boundaries.
 Similarly Paola’s expresses feelings of alienation from groups on the basis of ethnicity reflecting feelings of isolation.
Kuura – in contrast…
 Kuura is comfortable and integrated into the multi-cultural university environment.
 Hurtado et al (2007) state the importance of ‘cross-racial interactions’ for higher sense of belonging on campus.

13. Main points of the qualitative research
 This study suggests a reframing of contemporary thinking about sense of belonging and transition to
encompass a set of relationships, often ignored, which to our students are significant i.e. family, friends and
community.
 What emerges is the importance of considering the ways in which social relationship develop (or not ) for
stayeducation students particularly in the absence of shared the physical living spaces highlighted as key by
to this process by Chow and Healey (2008).
 Everything these students experience is coloured by the life they lived before, and which they continue to
return to at the end of each day. The implications suggest that universities need to be more responsive to
home and community factors.
 This might encompass further research into the role of family and old friends in transition; reconstituting
university spaces to enable a different set of relationships to emerge, social rather than educational.
 This could lead to a reframing of the classroom and university space as one in which affords these
students opportunities to develop new social relationships and support, similar to those
living on campus.

14. You can adjust yourself to the [university]
environment but there’s only so much you can
do … because you have to go back to your old
environment from where you came initially and
where you spend most of your life…So getting
used to [university] will be tough…

15. References
Bourdieu, P. (1983). “The Forms of Capital.” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education , edited by J. Richardson, 241-258.
Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
Chow, K., M. Healey.(2008). Place attachment and place identity: First-year undergraduates making the transition from home to university. Journal of
Environmental Psychology. 28 (4): 362-372.
Kane, S, Chalcraft, D & Volpe, G, (2014) 'Notions of belonging: First year, first semester higher education students enrolled on business or economics
degree programmes', The International Journal of Management Education, 12 (2), 193-201.
Reay, D., G. Croziers, and J. Clayton, (2010). ‘Fitting in’ or ‘standing out’ working class students in UK higher education, British Educational Research
Journal, 36(1):107-124.
Pokorny, H., Holley, D. & Kane, S.(2016), 'Commuting, transitions and belonging: the experiences of students living at home in their first year at
university', High Education (2016). doi:10.1007/s10734-016-0063-3
Taylor, R. (2011). University cities thrive on students. The Guardian. April 18.
Thomas, L. (2012). Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: Final report from the what works? Student
retention and success programme
Tinto, V. (1975). Dropout from Higher Education: A Theoretical Synthesis of Recent Research, Review of Educational Research 45 (1): 89 -125.
Wengraf, T. (2001). Qualitative Research Interviewing: biographic narrative and semi-structured method, Sage Publications, London
Wojtas, O.(2014). Making sure the locals feel part of the community, Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey, 15 May.
Image 1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lauren-stevens/three-is-the-magic-number_1_b_5958036.html
Image 2 http://shadow-master-nara.deviantart.com/
Image 3 https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesabennett/5509492643