UWEC CERCA 2026

Our project examines how students navigate forming social connections during their first year of college. According to Liu et al. (2025), social connectedness is multidimensional and influenced by students’ perceptions of their relationships, the actions they take to engage with others, and the emotions associated with belonging and inclusion. We chose to focus on this topic because prior research demonstrates links between social connectedness, academic performance, and mental health.We developed a semi-structured interview and selected two pre-existing measures to explore social connectedness. The interview includes questions about respondents’ high school expectations regarding making connections in college compared to what actually occurred, as well as questions about the actions they took to build social networks. The Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) and R-UCLA Loneliness scales will be used to examine respondents’ emotions related to connectedness. Respondents have been identified using purposive sampling (all UWEC first-year students), and our goal is to meet with twelve participants.Once data collection is complete, we will conduct a thematic analysis of the interview responses and use descriptive statistics to analyze the FoMO and loneliness data. Our goal for this project is to better understand how UWEC students form social connections during their first year of college.