Dr. DeLeon Gray
AUGUST 13, 2026
This spring, a team of middle school researchers from Wake and Durham County public schools did something studies about young people don’t do often enough. Young people collected the data themselves, coded it themselves, and then told the adults what it meant.
They surveyed 477 of their peers on a Belonging and Wellness Student Poll that they designed. Working in pairs late into the night, they read open-ended responses and negotiated the right label for each one until they agreed—the same inductive coding a doctoral student would be trained in during their PhD journey. Then they partnered with doctoral students in a university research methods course to run statistics on their data set, and they carried the findings to the national stage at the American Educational Research Association.
Here is the most important thing our team seeks to emphasize: Young people are the experts of their own belonging experience.
Here is the most important thing our team seeks to emphasize: Young people are the experts of their own belonging experience. Nobody has better insight into whether they belong in your space than they do. Give them the tools, and they will show you exactly what they see.
They are reading the room—the people, the setting, and the system. Those three domains have names. In our Opportunities to Belong framework (Gray, Hope, & Matthews, 2018), belonging is conceptualized across three structures: interpersonal, instructional, and institutional.
Interpersonal: Are there people here I connect to?
We asked about the things adults do to seem cool that just make it worse, and 44% named using slang. In interviews, the students were generous about it. They described the discomfort of watching an adult they liked reach for a shortcut around the connection they had already started to build. They can feel the difference between an adult connecting and an adult performing a connection. The move that works is the opposite of trying harder. Walk in your own confidence, and when you genuinely want to understand their world, let them teach you. A young person explaining their culture to an adult who is truly listening is belonging in motion.
Instructional: Is this a setting I want to belong in?
A young person makes inferences about their own belonging by watching what happens to people who get things wrong—including the adults. Students are precise observers of the distance between what adults say and what they do. One of the clearest examples in the data was the phone rule. One in four students expressed that adults who impose phone rules on them also spend significant time scrolling and laughing while looking at their own devices.
They also want adults to own their Ls when they make a mistake. When you say, “I got that wrong,” or say “Teach me, I don’t actually know that one,” you make it safe for a young person to be wrong, too—to ask the awkward question, to give the honest answer.
Institutional: Do people here value people like me?
The dress code theme emerged throughout the youth-led poll, even though no question was ever asked about it. When students were asked what makes them roll their eyes, many answered, “Take your hood off.” If there is one thing the middle schoolers we work with love, it’s a nice, comfortable hoodie. Think about it: They are rapidly developing and going through puberty, experiencing bad hair days, or simply expressing themselves through fashion. Hoodies cover all bases. As one seventh grader explained, “Not being able to have your hood on makes zero sense—you can still see the person.” That is a thirteen-year-old auditing a rule and reporting that no one ever gave a reason for it. When the reason is missing, young people fill the blank, sometimes with the least generous explanation available.
Ask the experts you already have
The young people you serve are likely asking themselves: Are these people real? Is this setting safe? Is this system fair?
The young people you serve are likely asking themselves: Are these people real? Is this setting safe? Is this system fair? You can gather those data the way the students did. Ask your own version of the question with the young people you serve—”Name something here that doesn’t make sense to you”—anonymously. Then report back, and name one thing that will change because of what you heard. The asking is easy. The reporting back and making adjustments is where it gets tough.
In closing, you do not have to guess how belonging is going in your space. You have experts on site. The middle schoolers who ran the study we supported coded the responses, ran the statistics, and presented to a room of professors—and they demonstrated that when young people take the methodological reins, they surface what many of us miss.
Want to learn more about what it takes to foster belonging? Hear DeLeon speak at #HealthyTeen26 in San Diego, October 5–7!
