School Climate Inventory: Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Reliability-Validity

Abstract

Problem Statement: A school's climate is related to the nature of its atmosphere, i.e., whether positive or negative. In other words, school climate is related to such factors as the physical condition of a school, teacher behavior, administrative approaches, class schedules, peer relations, and school rules. School climate substantially affects student adaptation. Establishing a positive school climate increases student productivity and makes students more content at school. In Turkish literature, there is no scale to measure school climate. Therefore, a comprehensive instrument that measures school climate is needed. In the first study conducted as part of this research, the factor structure of the scale was determined using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. In the second study, for concurrent and discriminant validity, on the Inventory of School Climate-Student were compared with conceptually-related constructs, depression, life satisfaction, and self-esteem. Research Objective: The aim of this study was to adapt the Inventory of School Climate-Student (ISC-S) to Turkish settings and conduct a study of its validity and reliability. Method: Study 1 participants consisted of 707 secondary school students, 394 female and 313 male, who were randomly selected from the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades of eight different secondary schools in the Denizli province of Turkey. Study 2 included 317 participants. Findings and Results: Exploratory factor analysis was used to test the validity of ISC-S. A nine-factor scale was obtained. Factor loads of each subscale items varied from.30 to.79. To test the findings of this structure, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used. CFA yielded the following results: X2 = (1139, N = 707) 2013.98, RMSEA = 0.03, SRMR =0.03, CFI = 0.96, GFI = 0.91 and TLI/NNFI = 0.96. The Cornbach's alpha internal consistency coefficients of the scale varied between.48 and.84. Conclusions and Recommendations: The ISC-S was adapted to Turkish settings in order to conduct research on school climates, an important area of study. The factor analysis that was conducted to determine the scale's psychometric qualities only yielded data of a medium explanatory level. The adaptive values obtained by CFA, which was based on structural equation modeling, were sufficient, as expected. Alpha values were found to be adequate for some scales. As a result, the ISC-S may measure school climate in secondary schools in a valid and reliable way.