Quality of School Life: A Scale to Measure Student Experience or School Climate?

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine school (institutional) influences on the latent structure of the seven subscales of the Quality of School Life scale, a measure of school life at the student level. A total of 5,932 twelfth-year students (3,048 males and 2,884 females) enrolled in 50 Australian parochial schools were administered the instrument. Structural equation models were fit to the subscales and the subsequent variance component analysis revealed that only about 2%-3% of the variances were explained by between-school differences. As predicted, results of two-level factor analyses supported the findings that the school level has only a small effect on the factor structure of the items making up the scales.

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