The Tripod School Climate Index: An Invariant Measure of School Safety and Relationships
| Autor: | Sarah Fierberg Phillips, Jacob F. S. Rowley |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: |
Sociology and Political Science
Social work education 05 social sciences Psychological intervention 050301 education Poison control Human factors and ergonomics Articles Bivariate analysis Suicide prevention Occupational safety and health 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Measurement invariance Psychology 0503 education Social psychology 050104 developmental & child psychology |
| Zdroj: | Social Work Research. 40:31-39 |
| ISSN: | 1545-6838 1070-5309 |
| Popis: | Recently revised standards for social work practice in schools encourage data-informed school climate interventions that implicitly require invariant measures of school climate. Invariant measures have the same meaning, scale, and origin across different groups of respondents. Although noninvariant measures bias statistical analyses and can lead users to erroneous conclusions, most school climate measures have not been tested for invariance. This study examines the invariance of the Tripod School Climate Index. Exploratory, confirmatory, and multiple-group confirmatory factor analyses were conducted on data collected from 66,531 students across 222 schools. RESULTS indicate that the index is an excellent fit for the data and invariant by student grade level, demographic background, prior achievement, and dropout risk. RESULTS imply that student responses can be validly aggregated to create school-level scores. The index will not bias studies of school climate interventions or bivariate analyses comparing perceptions of school climate across subgroups of students attending the same school. Given the centrality of school climate interventions to social work practice in schools and the consequences of noninvariance, the development of an index with these properties is an important contribution to the field. Language: en |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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