Digital Citizenship and Community Belonging Among University Students: The Mediating Role of Sustainable Education

The intersection of digital citizenship, sustainable education, and community belonging represents an emerging yet underexplored area of inquiry, particularly within Arab higher education contexts where institutional digitalization is accelerating alongside distinct sociocultural expectations around academic identity. This study aims to investigate the mediating role of sustainable education in the relationship between digital citizenship and community belonging among Egyptian university students. A quantitative cross-sectional survey design was employed with a main sample of 819 university students. Participants completed three validated instruments: the Revised Digital Citizenship Scale, the Sustainable Education Scale, and the Where I Belong Survey. Mediation analysis was conducted using Hayes’ PROCESS macro with 5000 bootstrap resamples. Results reveal that digital citizenship is significantly and positively associated with both sustainable education and community belonging. Sustainable education, in turn, significantly predicts community belonging after controlling for digital citizenship, with the indirect effect accounting for approximately 38% of the total effect, consistent with partial mediation. These findings demonstrate that responsible digital engagement is associated with community belonging not only directly but also in a pattern statistically consistent with partial mediation through sustainability-oriented values including equity, inclusiveness, and democratic participation. These findings suggest theoretically informed directions for future intervention design, wherein integrating sustainable education principles into digital learning environments may warrant empirical investigation as a potential approach to cultivating ethically grounded, socially cohesive academic communities.