Sense of belonging and well-being among Indigenous Peoples of Canada: The role of community involvement

Abstract

Well-being is a multidimensional construct whose conceptualizations vary across disciplines, cultures, and contexts. Belonging is a fundamental human need that plays a key role in fostering well-being with extensive research showing that stronger sense of belonging is linked to better mental and physical health. Indigenous conceptualizations of well-being and belonging reflect a holistic, relational understanding of health as balance among mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual domains, that are cultivated through reciprocal relationships with family, community, natural world, ancestors, and culture. Community involvement represents an avenue through which belonging and well-being are cultivated. While there is extensive research exploring the association between well-being, belonging, and community involvement there remains a lack of research exploring these associations within Indigenous populations in Canada. The present study used data from the 2017 Aboriginal Peoples Survey (N = 18,679) to examine whether two types of community involvement (organizational volunteering and helping others) moderated the association between belonging and well-being among Indigenous Peoples living off reserve in Canada. By running two separate moderation regression analysis, we hypothesized that belonging (H1) and both forms of community involvement (H2) would be positively associated with well-being, and that both types of community involvement would moderate this association (H3). In Model 1 (organizational volunteering), did not reveal a main effect for belonging. Community involvement significantly predicted well-being (b = .05, p < .001), and no significant interaction was found. In Model 2 (helping others), we found a significant main effect for both belonging (b = .03, p = .006), and community involvement in (b = .01, p = .028) Model 2 also revealed a significant interaction between belonging and helping others (b = .02, p = .028), indicating that the positive association between belonging and well-being was stronger at higher levels of helping others. Our findings highlight that different forms of community involvement may have unique impacts on the belonging-well-being relationship, and that informal participation in community may be meaningful target of focus to promote well-being among Indigenous Peoples.