School Climate Research: Italian Adaptation and Validation of a Multidimensional School Climate Questionnaire

In this article, we present a multidimensional school climate questionnaire, based on an adaptation and validation of the Socio-Educational Environment Questionnaire, which is an instrument developed in Canada, assessing several dimensions of school climate. In particular, the aim of this research was to create a Multidimensional School Climate Questionnaire, which is adding to the original measure by testing a second-order factor model. We conducted two studies with different samples of middle school students (aged from 10 to 16 years) from Northern Italy (Study 1: 575 students and Study 2: 1070 students), and collected data on the psychometric features of the instrument, its reliability and validity. In particular, in Study 1, we carried out the adaptation process and an exploratory factor analysis. In Study 2, we conducted first- and second-order confirmatory factor analysis and tested the associations with school engagement and burnout scales. Overall, our results supported the stability of the adaptation and offered further insights into the original instrument. Assessment implications are discussed.