Development of the Multidimensional School Anger Inventory for males

Abstract

Drawing upon research which conceptualizes anger as a multidimensional construct including three associated components—anger experience (affective anger), hostility (anger cognitions), and anger expression (aggression, assertion, and withdrawal)—the preliminary development of a Multidimensional School Anger Inventory (MSAI) for adolescents is described. This scale is a modification and extension of the School Anger Inventory and was developed to assess the affective, cognitive, and expressive aspects of anger using items having school‐relevant content. Data were collected through personal interviews of 202 males from three different schools: School 1 included general education students in a parochial school in grades 6 through 12; School 2 included students attending general education or mainstreamed special education classes at a public intermediate school; and School 3 included students participating in a public day treatment program for youths with serious emotional disturbance. Scale development is discussed focusing on item development and scale refinement through item and factor analyses. Four factors were identified that accounted for 43.3% of the common variance. Anger Experience, Cynical Attitudes, and Anger Expression were identified as major clusters with the anger expression items bifurcating into Destructive Expression and Positive Coping components. The resulting 31‐item scale has strong psychometric qualities and appears to have promise for use in research, treatment planning, and outcome evaluations. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Program Evaluation Challenges: Is Aggression Replacement Training (ART) Effective?

“…Multidimensional School Anger Inventory (MSAI; Smith, Furlong, Bates & Laughlin, 1998). The MSAI is a selfreport instrument, featuring 39 items, designed to measure cognitive, behavioral, and affective dimensions of anger in the context of a school setting.…”

“…The MSAI has been studied on several groups of adolescents, with the largest group (used for establishing psychometric properties) consisting of 1,589 high school students in grades 9 through 12 (Furlong, Smith & Bates, 2002). In the initial instrument evaluation, the MSAI was found to have good internal consistency, with Anger Experience subscale having the highest alpha coefficients across three samples, ranging .84 -.88 (Smith, et al 1998). Convergent validity was established via comparison with the Aggression Questionnaire [AQ; Buss & Perry, 2002] and the Connors Teacher Rating Scale [CTRS, Connors, 1989].…”

Bringing Peace to the Central City: Forgiveness Education in Milwaukee

“…Recent evidence suggests that anger interferes with adequate solution of the two main developmental tasks of childhood: establishing positive peer relationships (Sullivan, 1953) and achieving academically (Erikson, 1968). Anger is linked to aggression in general and, in particular, to reactive aggression (Arsenio, Cooperman, & Lover, 2000;Price & Dodge, 1989;Smith, Furlong, Bates, & Laughlin, 1998;Zeman, Shipman, & Suveg, 2002). Reactive aggression involves responding with hostility and defensiveness to another's behavior.…”

Adolescents’ Self-Esteem, School Anger and Life Satisfaction as Predictors of Their School Attachment

“…Okula bağlanmayı etkileyen bir diğer kavram, öğrencilerin okul ortamındaki yaşantılarına dayalı olarak geliştirdikleri öfke durumu olan okul öfkesidir (Smith, Furlong, Bates ve Laughlin, 1998). Özellikle zamanlarının büyük bölümünü geçirdikleri okul ve okulla ilgili etkinlik ve ilişkiler doğal olarak okul öfkesini ortaya çıkarmaktadır.…”