Culture of Fear In Schools Scale: Validity and Reliability Study

Abstract

The aim of this study is to develop a scale to determine the level of fear cultureexperienced by teachers in schools. For the purpose of this study, a 32-item pool wascreated by researchers in the context of literature review and teacher opinions. Thesesubstances were examined with field expert and measurement assessment specialistand the number of items was reduced to 29. Based on the opinions obtained from 20experts for the candidate scale, it was decided that 8 items should be removed fromthe scale and a 21-item, 5-point Likert-type scale was created. The resulting scalewas prepared as an online form. The prepared form was delivered to teachers byusing e-mail and other communication tools and feedback was received from 320teachers. As a result of the exploratory factor analysis conducted to determine theconstruct validity of the scale, it was determined that the scale consists of 3-factorstructure explaining 64,662% of the total variance. It was concluded that factorstructure was appropriate with confirmatory factor analysis. In order to verify thecriterion validity of the study item-total test correlation, t-test between the upper andlower 27% groups were examined. "Climate of Fear Scale" was used for similar scalevalidity. In order to determine the reliability results, Cronbach's Alpha values wereexamined according to the sub-dimensions and total score of the scale and it wasfound that these values ranged between 0.80 and 0.92. Fear culture level can bedetermined in schools by taking the total score of the developed scale.