Does School Climate Mean the Same Thing in the U.S. as in Mexico?
Catherine Bradshaw, Kathan D. Shukla, Tracy E. Waasdorp, Sarah Lindstrom Johnson, Mercedes Gabriela Orozco Solis, Amanda J. Nguyen, Cecilia Colunga Rodriguez
Introduction: School climate is an important construct for guiding violence prevention efforts in US schools, but there has been less consideration of this concept in its neighboring country Mexico, which has a higher prevalence of violence. The US Department of Education (USDOE) recommends a three-factor conceptualization of school climate that comprises multidimensional domains of student engagement (6 subscales), school environment (6 subscales), and student safety (3 subscales). Researchers typically assume that items are understood and interpreted in the same way across respondents, and answered with the same frame of reference regardless of group membership. However, this assumption has not been tested in the context of school climate for U.S. versus Mexican youth. In order to examine the applicability of this three-factor model in Mexico, the present study tested its measurement invariance.
Methods: Participants included middle school students from both Mexico (N=2,211) and the US (N = 15,099). Students completed an anonymous online school climate survey that assessed student engagement, school environment, and student safety. Measurement invariance tests (i.e., configural, metric, and scalar) were conducted separately in Mplus for each of the domains of school climate.
Results: Findings supported full invariance for engagement and modified-safety scales indicating that factor loadings and intercepts contribute almost equally to factor means, and scale scores are comparable across groups. Moreover, partial invariance was found for environment scales. In addition, results of a multi-group CFA consisting of all 13 school climate subscales indicated significantly positive associations among all subscales in US and among most scales in Mexico. Finally, scale score means comparison revealed that the Mexican students tend to report more bullying and drug use, as well as, higher levels of school engagement as compared to their American peers.
Conclusion: Research comparing school climate in the U.S. and Mexico would be particularly helpful in identifying areas in which schools struggle in promoting positive school climate. This would enable researchers and educators to evaluate the cross-cultural applicability of existing prevention initiatives aimed at improving school climates. The current study contributes to the literature by providing a basis for which to begin this comparative research.
This abstract was submitted to the 2017 Society for Prevention Research Annual Meeting.
