Development and Validation of Perceived School Climate Scale (PSCS)

Pages: 547-554
Vandana Singh and Anubhuti Dubey (Department of Psychology, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh)

School Climate is relevant to students’ well-being and academic achievement. Despite having great interest in this field, we did not pay much attention to the proper theoretical model and instrument to assess school climate, suitable to the Indian schooling system. Thus, the present study aims to develop and validate an indigenous school climate scale. Initially, 26-items were constructed from three focus discussions with 31 students. To study the factor structure of the scale, we performed Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) on 331 students. Finally, Perceived School Climate Scale (PSCS) was built with four factors: Academic Climate, Teacher’s Support, Infrastructural Climate, and Safety and Belongingness. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed on the sample of 481 students, and 17 items were retained. Multi-group confirmatory analysis revealed that the overall factor structure holds up similarly for both male and female students. The theoretical and practical implication was also discussed at end of the study.