DOI: 10.3886/icpsr38022.v1
title: Improvement of School Climate Assessment in Virginia Secondary Schools, 2013-2020
title: Version 1

description: This study sought to advance understanding of how school climate is a critical factor in school safety and violence prevention. Middle school and high school students and staff were surveyed over the span of eight years from 2013-2020. Middle school students and staff were surveyed during odd years (4 waves of data collection), and high school students and staff were surveyed the other even years (again four years of data collection). All four years of data per group were combined into a single dataset. A final file was created pooling all eight years of data collection averaging student and staff responses by school. Both the student and teacher/staff surveys covered two domains: school climate and safety conditions. The school climate domain included perceptions of the school's disciplinary practices, student support efforts, and degree of student engagement in school. The safety conditions domain covered reports of bullying, teasing, sexual harassment, and other forms of peer aggression, including threats of violence, physical assault, dating aggression, and gang activity. Previous research conducted by the Principal Investigators showed that an authoritative school climate characterized by high structure (strict but fair discipline and high academic expectations) and high support (positive teacher-student relationships) is associated with many positive outcomes. Students who attend schools with an authoritative school climate demonstrated more engagement in school, have higher school attendance and academic achievement, and are more likely to graduate. Students who experience a structured and supportive school climate may be more willing to follow school rules, respond to their teachers, and treat one another in a respectful manner. This study continues that prior work.
description: The purpose of this study was to take the next steps in improving the school climate survey program for Virginia secondary schools. The three main goals of the project were to: Investigate stakeholder understanding and use of school climate data; Improve the school climate reporting process; Identify the longitudinal associations between school climate characteristics, school safety, and equity in student outcomes.
description: This project was assisted by the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services and Virginia Department of Education to administer a statewide school climate survey. The survey was administered in alternate years to middle schools and high schools. Over the first four years work concentrated on the survey content by developing survey scales, examining their psychometric properties, and testing hypotheses about the relations between school climate and school safety. Schools could choose to survey all students or a randomly selected sample of 25 students per grade.
description: A fair amount of overlap in questions exists across all four student and staff surveys (DS1 to DS4). Major sections of the surveys included: Student engagement and relationships Teacher / student relationships Prevalence of teasing and bullying School discipline and safety Student aggression / victimization Gang activity School resource officers Sexual harassment Mental health Additionally, each of the four files ends with nearly the same section of state administrative data pulled regarding enrollment numbers and percentages broken down by grade, gender, race, and student participation in the free and reduced lunch program. As for DS5 this file is a combination primarily of the school-level average responses for most of the individual items in DS1 to DS4. The last section of DS5 are state administrative variables providing total numbers on discipline, dropouts, graduates, passing rates of test results, and enrollment.
description: These data files do not contain weights. However, it should be noted that when the Principal Investigators calculated state prevalence rates described in their technical reports, they weighted schools by the number of students in the school. They did not use weights for most of their other statistical analyses.
description: Response Rates: In 2018, the surveys were completed by 99% of the schools, 82% of the students, and 46% of the staff. In 2019, the surveys went out to students and staff in 422 Virginia public middle schools. The participation rate among schools was 100%, students was 78%, and teachers/staff was 49%. In 2020, a total of 326 public high schools were approached to participate. The participation rate among schools was 92%, students was 71%, and teachers/staff was 46%.
description: Datasets: DS0: Study-Level Files DS1: Middle School Student Survey Data DS2: High School Student Survey Data DS3: Middle School Staff Survey Data DS4: High School Staff Survey Data DS5: School Level Climate Survey Data
description: Middle and high school students and staff in the state of Virginia. Smallest Geographic Unit: None
description: record abstracts; web-based surveySchool identifiers (<strong>SCHID</strong>) are the same across the individual and school level files and can be used to merge across student and staff files if needed. <strong>SID</strong> and <strong>TID</strong> are the unique respondent identifiers for students and staff respectively.Surveys amongst the middle school students (DS1) and staff (DS3) were conducted during the years of 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019. Surveys amongst the high school students (DS2) and staff (DS4) were conducted during the years of 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020.Although there were four years of surveys conducted for each group, the Principal Investigators only provided the last year's survey (2019) for the middle school students and staff, and the last two years (2018 and 2020) for the high school students and staff. The surveys for the students contain both English and Spanish versions of the survey.Over time some of the questions were not asked from one survey to the next. So the data files will not match up perfectly with the corresponding survey. To assist researchers the Principal Investigators provided variable labels that list which years the question was asked over the four survey periods.There were a total of 737 schools who participated during the eight-year project. The student and staff surveys were anonymous with different students and staff choosing to participate each year. It is possible to track longitudinal changes for schools, but not for individuals.Please refer to the accompanying User Guide for data limitations that explain about cases that were excluded from the final files, and how the Coronavirus pandemic affected response rates in 2020 due to school closures.