Measuring school climate: an overview of measurement scales

Abstract

Background: School climate is a heterogeneous concept with a multitude of standardised and validated instruments available to measure it.Purpose: This overview of measurement scales aims to provide researchers with short summaries of some of the self-report instruments in existence, especially in relation to the link between school climate and aggression, within the context of Bronfenbrenner’s model. A secondary aim of this article is to show how the same instrument can sometimes be adapted to fit different theoretical approaches or to focus on different dimensions of school climate.Design and methods: After database consultation and literature hand searching, the resulting literature was screened for a statistical analysis of school climate and aggression. Those studies that had unclear operationalisations of the main variables or used qualitative methods were excluded. The resulting selection of studies were further scanned for common instruments used to evaluate school climate.Conclusions: This article will show how the California School Climate Survey (CSCS), the Psychological Sense of School Membership Scale (PSSM), the School Climate Survey (SCS) and the Effective School Battery (ESB) as well as different versions of self-created scales on school connectedness, school climate and school culture have been adapted by different researchers in different contexts. Finally, the necessity of adapting a pre-existing instrument or creating a new one will be discussed.