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

Abstract

Problem Statement: school's climate is related to the nature of itsatmosphere, i.e., whether positive or negative. In other words, schoolclimate is related to such factors as the physical condition of school,teacher behavior, administrative approaches, class schedules, peerrelations, and school rules. School climate substantially affects studentadaptation. Establishing positive school climate increases studentproductivity and makes students more content at school. In Turkishliterature, there is no scale to measure school climate. Therefore,comprehensive instrument that measures school climate is needed. Inthe first study conducted as part of this research, the factor structure ofthe scale was determined using exploratory and confirmatory factoranalyses. In the second study, for concurrent and discriminant validity,on the Inventory of School Climate-Student were compared withconceptually-related constructs, depression, life satisfaction, and selfesteem.Research Objective: The aim of this study was to adapt the Inventory ofSchool Climate-Student (ISC—S) to Turkish settings and conduct studyof its validity and reliability.Method: Study 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 Denizliprovince of Turkey. Study included 317 participants.Findings and Results: Exploratory factor analysis was used to test thevalidity of lSC—S. nine-factor scale was obtained. Factor loads of eachsubscale items varied from .30 to .79. To test the findings of thisstructure, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used. CFA yielded thefollowing results: X2 (1139, 707) 2013.98, RMSEA 0.03, SRMR0.03, CFl 0.96, GFI 0.91 and TLl/ NNFI 0.96. The Cornbach's alphainternal consistency coefficients of the scale varied between .48 and .84.Conclusions and Recommendations: The lSC-S was adapted to Turkishsettings in order to conduct research on school climates, an importantarea of study. The factor analysis that was conducted to determine thescale's psychometric qualities only yielded data of mediumexplanatory level. The adaptive values obtained by CFA, which wasbased on structural equation modeling, were sufficient, as expected.Alpha values were found to be adequate for some scales. As result, thelSC—S may measure school climate in secondary schools in valid andreliable way.