The Belonging Barometer
A new tool to better navigate, understand and ease our crisis of belonging
With political polarization and other indicators of division at high boil, many Americans still don’t feel belonging at work nor in their local communities. Can better data help?
CHICAGO— Every now and then, a fictional character can have a profound, real-world impact.
I’m thinking about Richie Jerimovich, the foul-mouthed, disgruntled character in the Emmy Award-winning FX series, The Bear—the third season of which began streaming last month.
In nearly every episode, Richie gives everyone around him a hugely hard time out of fear and anger at his life, but in doing so, he is challenging us, too. He opens a window into the emotions of so many we’ve all encountered, and who—for one reason or another—don’t feel they belong. “Richie makes us examine ourselves,” says author David French, another fan of the show, “and forces us to answer a difficult question: How do we respond to people who are experiencing pain?”
I’m not a TV critic, but if you haven’t seen the show, its story—though simple—mirrors real life. New York City chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) returns home to Chicago after his brother dies and leaves Carmy the local family sandwich shop—and all of its employees to manage. Richie is the shop’s de facto manager—and he’s angry, abusive, loud and aggressive. He is intolerable; he feels left out of things. Soon, though, we realize he is experiencing intense pain. He just buried his best friend. He’s recently divorced. He doesn’t see his daughter much. Carmy decides to keep him around; Richie remains difficult, the restaurant remains a challenge but slowly, Richie is able to establish his place and discover a purpose. Over time, he belongs.
We all know people like Richie. Characters who don’t fit, whose anger in these days of turbulence masks the pain and virtue.
It is why, after watching the latest episode of the show this past week, I was reminded to take a mini-deep dive into a recent YouGov survey conducted with the American Immigration Council and Over Zero, two research companies seeking to tackle America’s belonging crisis by creating a new resource for local governments, schools, companies and causes to better navigate and nurture inclusion. “We created this new measure as a data exercise, to get some kind of deeply accurate picture of where we’re all at, as Americans, on the pain spectrum,” says AIC Founder Rachel Brown. “Where do we feel we belong, where and how do we feel shut out and how might we create, reinvent or sustain our notions of community?”
The Belonging Barometer
A lot has been said over the past decade about a “belonging gap” being felt by all Americans, regardless of our cultural, religious, racial and age differences. Some blame the gap on socioeconomic differences; others chalk it up to fear of fast change, despite the toothy smiles many of us use to mask our stress and unease.
But what’s new is that belonging has been difficult to measure—until now. According to The Belonging Barometer: The State of Belonging in America, 64% of Americans feel they “non-belong” in the workplace and 74% feel they “non-belong” in their local community, with many others lacking a deep sense of belonging in the United States, including many born and raised here.
Most polls on belonging so far have, typically, focused narrowly on loneliness and social relationships. The Belonging Barometer, which launched with an expanded addendum measuring belonging across a dozen demographic differences, also enables a much wider examination of a range of experiences that can influence how one fits into a particular environment today. For example, the Barometer taps into social connections, and emotional connections, and relationship satisfaction scoring. Added to that are measures of psychological safety—defined as a state of feeling sufficiently safe to to be vulnerable and to take risks. Another measure in the Barometer’s mix explores agency—one’s ability to co-create the organizations, systems and structures which shape one’s future, if desired. “Feeling welcomed and included does not equate to belonging unless you are also able to influence outcomes,” says john a. powell, an advisor on the Barometer project, the founding director of the Othering & Belonging Institute and a professor of Law, African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Belonging Barometer also situates its findings in five different life settings — family, friendships, workplace, local community and national citizenship, primary components of modern life where most people have a reason to want to belong. The framework also measures how safe someone feels either dissenting, offering diverse perspectives or off-beat ideas for discussion amid rejection or pushback from colleagues.
The American Immigration Council and Over Zero began this as an effort to help state, local and government officials learn to better recognize the stress and unease that so many Americans feel these days, so as to encourage U.S. towns, cities, suburbs and rural areas to determine common values and understand differences to affect real change. Colorado state officials unveiled their version of the Belonging Barometer last week. The model is also being used in the UK.
In the annual study, respondents also were asked about their ‘state of belonging’—in the United States, and were asked to use the terms belonging, ambiguity and exclusion to describe their state of belonging in different contexts. In the survey, the word belonging describes social connection, psychological safety and a sense of agency within a group; ambiguity describes some feelings of inclusion and some feelings of being ignored, and exclusion describes strong feelings of being “othered” or rejected by dominant groups. The term, “non-belonging” combines ambiguity and exclusion as responses.
The Findings
Here are some highlights of the 2024 study:
In the United States today, feelings of non-belonging are widespread throughout American life. The majority of respondents reported ‘non-belonging’ in three life settings: the workplace (64%), the nation (67%) and their local communities (74%).
Socioeconomic status and other demographic factors are strongly associated with belonging. Across life settings—the workplace, the nation, local communities, family and friends—Americans are more likely to report belonging if they also see themselves as being better off, or much better off, economically than the average American.
A substantial percentage of Americans (20%) feel they are treated as being “less than others” in their daily lives, with 20% saying they feel this way when interacting with local law enforcement; when voting (15%);, or when interacting with local elected officials (21%).
Belonging and diversity are related, an insight that Barometer designers say will grow increasingly important as the United States becomes increasingly diverse. “Additionally, belonging is vital force in American society,” the report says. Belonging scores were associated with critical life outcomes in health (mental and physical) and in the workplace, at social events and during community involvement as local citizens.
American democracy “is at a dangerous inflection point,” respondents agreed. According to the report, “the age and strength of our democratic institutions may serve as a bulwark against authoritarianism, yet nearly every esteemed measure of international democracy shows U.S. scores to be in democratic decline.” That said, however, 60% of respondents said, when asked if democracy was failing, agreed with the statement: “When average Americans get involved in voting, protest and advocacy, they can change the way our nation is run.”
Despite news reports in recent years of how our most intimate networks have been impacted by larger social divisions, respondents reported their highest rates of belonging are felt during time with family and friends—though about 40% of Americans said they “experienced either ambiguity or exclusion in what could be their most intimate relationships.”
In the workplace, only about one-third of respondents said they felt like they belonged. Of both blue- and white-collar workers responding, 36% reported belonging, 50% said they weren’t sure, and 14% reported exclusion. “At a time of increasing social segregation in the United States, workplaces need to do more to facilitate the type of effective intergroup social contact that can increase cross-group empathy” and encourage the exchange of different perspectives, the report said.
In our local communities, respondents said, belonging was felt least. Belonging at the local level “has been declining since the late 1960s, and more than half of Americans today report a lack of connection to their local neighborhoods,” the report says. “People today tend to live in environments where they are surrounded by people similar to themselves—a structural reality which leads to echo chambers amplifying existing views and ideologies and suppressing social contact across socioeconomic, racial or geographic lines in ways that discourage understanding and dialogue across lines of difference.”
New Rules
The organizations using this new methodology and in-depth survey framework acknowledge that the Barometer model serves as a “snapshot” of belonging in the United States today, and say they will be issuing annual versions and variations of the tool, itself, to measure different levels of belonging over time for their workers, students, residents, citizens of all stripes — and to track new policy and training interventions before and after new data is used to catalyze change.
“Our hope is that by creating an increasingly robust measure, it will be possible to tailor interventions to improve belonging” and to identify which interventions work best in different contexts over time, Executive Director Brown says.
Stay tuned for more to come. To drill down further for more information, here’s the PDF of the report. Let us know what you think.
Will better data help to ease the belonging crisis, and make public policymakers more accountable for easing the crisis going forward? Let us hear from you!