Profiles of basic psychological need frustration and their associations with belonging and wellbeing among Saudi undergraduates in English-medium instruction

Frustration of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness undermines student wellbeing, yet most research treats the three needs as separate continuous predictors, obscuring how they combine within individual students. Taking a person-centred approach, this study identified profiles of need frustration among 607 undergraduates in English-medium instruction (EMI) programmes in Saudi Arabia and examined how the profiles related to school belonging and to personal (emotional–academic) and social wellbeing. Latent profile analysis of the three frustration dimensions yielded five profiles: two large profiles distinguished mainly by overall severity (low and mild frustration) and three smaller, configurally distinct profiles characterised by pervasive–relational frustration, acute competence frustration, and a relatedness-spared agentic frustration.

The profiles differed substantially in belonging, personal wellbeing, and social wellbeing, and the content of frustration corresponded to the domain most affected: relatedness frustration accompanied the lowest social wellbeing, whereas autonomy and competence frustration accompanied the lowest personal wellbeing. Profile membership was largely independent of gender, major, and English-exposure category, with only a weak association with year of study. These findings characterise the heterogeneity of need frustration in EMI—most students differing in overall severity and a minority in configuration—and offer a provisional, descriptive basis for identifying and supporting students whose frustration is concentrated in particular needs.

The author would like to thank all participants in this study for their time in filling out the survey. This work was supported by the Deanship of Scientific Research, Vice Presidency for Graduate Studies and Scientific Research, King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia [Grant No. Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions.

School of Education, Adelaide University, Adelaide, 5000, SA, Australia Department of English, College of Arts, King Faisal University, Al-Ahsa 31982, Saudi Arabia The author declares no competing interests. All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research ethics committee and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments. The study received institutional research-ethics approval prior to data collection.

Electronic informed consent was obtained from all participants: before accessing the questionnaire, participants were presented with a full description of the study’s purpose and procedures and were required to confirm their agreement to participate, without which they could not proceed. During the preparation of this work, the author used Anthropic Claude to assist with drafting and editing text and with generating and debugging analysis code in R. All AI-assisted output was reviewed, verified, and edited by the author, who takes full responsibility for the content, including the accuracy of all statistical analyses and references.

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