Assessing Student Perceptions of School Victimization and School Safety

Abstract

In an effort to assess students' perceptions of victimization in their schools, as well as their schools' safety, over 1,900 students from elementary, middle, high, and alternative schools were administered a 154-item questionnaire. The responses on the items were used to establish the psychometric properties of 19 theoretically driven scales and subscales developed by the researchers. The results support the use of these scales and indices to measure students' self-reported levels of school victimization and victimization response, school safety, delinquency, weapons threat response, severity of school problems, school climate, future goals, attachment to school, alienation, negative peer influence, and strain. Additionally, this research describes the characteristics of the student sample on all of these dimensions.