The development and initial validation of an instrument measuring levels of violence suffered and practiced by students in higher education

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the development and initial validation of an instrument, namely IV-SOPRA (Index of Violence Suffered and Practiced), measuring levels of violence suffered and practiced by students in Higher Education institutions; thus, seeking to advance research into the issue of violence connected to Higher Education. Participants are undergraduate students ( n = 1188), who responded to an online questionnaire from a university in the south of Brazil. This was a convenience sample. The population was from all undergraduate courses offered at the partner university (i.e. Arts and Humanities; Social Sciences; Sciences; Medicine). Data analysis was conducted using R environment (R Core Team, 2020), and lavaan package (Rosseel, 2011). Confirmatory factor analysis was carried to investigate model fit to the data according to theorised structure of the IV-SOPRA subscales. Each subscale demonstrates good to excellent fit to the data, according to fit measures and reliability indices. The instrument provides Higher Education institutions with a tool for evaluating and diagnosing levels of prejudice and bullying on campus, so that effective measures can be put in place to deal with problems at hand.