Middle school student perceptions of school climate: Examining protective functions on subsequent adjustment problems☆
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 488 10-to-14-year old students attending all three middle schools in a suburban school district in central Texas and involved in the 1st and 2nd waves of a larger study. At Wave 1, students were in the 6th and 7th grades (M age = 11.69; SD = .76). Wave 2 occurred one year later when students were in the 7th and 8th grades (M age = 12.76; SD = .71). Fifty-four percent of these students were female; 78% were European–American, 16% were Latino, 3.5% were African American and 2.4%
Preliminary analyses
Because our sample was comprised of students reporting varying races/ethnicities and prior research suggests that the protective role of overall school climate varies across these groups (Kuperminc et al., 1997), we conducted preliminary analyses to determine if race/ethnicity effects should be examined. Box's M test was conducted to examine whether the homogeneity of the variance/covariance matrices for all study variables differed across race/ethnicity (see Tabachnik & Fidell, 2001). Results
Discussion
Although early adolescents spend the majority of their waking day in the school, relatively few studies have examined the role of individual perceptions of the middle school climate on changes in emotional and behavioral adjustment. The present study aimed to extend prior cross-sectional research by examining whether student perceptions of friction, cohesion, and competition among classmates, and overall satisfaction with classes moderated the relations between effortful control and change in
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Cited by (0)
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We thank Sheri Robinson for her contribution to this project.