A team of students and faculty members will investigate “pockets of community” at Northwestern in order to find and enhance relationships between different groups at the university.

“We’re trying to figure out what parts of Northwestern make people feel they belong,” said Mark Witte, an economics lecturer involved in the planning of the project.

Witte said the research, to begin in late January or early February, will focus on academic communities within schools.

The Weinberg College of Art and Science’s mandatory freshman seminars are examples of these communities, he said.

Researchers also will investigate areas where a sense of community may be lacking, such as majors with a large number of students. In popular majors such as economics, students may not know one another and clubs and activities related to the major may not be as effective, he said.

“(Economics is) so huge,” Witte said. “It’s sort of amazing that some of our top majors don’t know each other. There’s no academic exchange there.”

The researchers also plan to investigate other non-academic components of community at NU, such as student groups.

“Student organizations are very important for people’s lives,” he said. He pointed to the residential college system as a place where students build communities.

Six to eight students will conduct most of the research, which will guided by a faculty committee. The committee hopes to have one representative from all six undergraduate schools, except Weinberg and McCormick, which will have two.

The committee currently has students from every school except Medill and Music, Witte said.

Most schools will give independent study credit for the research, he said.