Authoritative school climate as a context for civic socialization

Abstract

This study represents a confirmatory attempt to classify schools based on the Authoritative Socialization Theory and test whether schools' classification is invariant across different structural characteristics of schools. Furthermore, it tests whether school typologies are related to school outcomes such as school violence, sense of belonging, and student participation. Through latent class analysis and a multilevel modeling approach, we analyzed data from a representative national survey in 1322 Chilean schools. Consistent with authoritative socialization theory and previous research, a four-class model was retained by considering two school climate dimensions: disciplinary structure and student support. These classes were named authoritative, indifferent, authoritarian, and permissive based on theory. In addition, classes showed to be invariant between schools considering the school administration and the school's religiosity; however, regarding the school size, the model showed to be partially invariant. Finally, the school levels of violence and belonging showed the expected pattern considering the theory and previous evidence; however, the average student participation levels showed an unexpected pattern. We conclude that the proposed methodology to classify schools is helpful and offers some advantages to the current classification methods under this theoretical framework. In substantive terms, our results show that not all students have the same probability of experiencing a nurturing school climate within a school system such as the Chilean one characterized by high levels of school segregation.