Measuring Kindness at School: Psychometric Properties of a School Kindness Scale for Children and Adolescents

Abstract

In this study, we sought to create and validate a brief measure to assess students' perceptions of kindness in school. Participants included 1,753 students in Grades 4 to 8 attending public schools in a large school district in southern British Columbia. The School Kindness Scale (SKS) demonstrated a unidimensional factor structure and adequate internal consistency. The pattern of associations of the SKS to a corpus of theoretically relevant constructs obtained via student self-reports (classroom supportiveness, optimism, happiness, prosocial and social goals, satisfaction with life, and academic self-efficacy) provided evidence for convergent and discriminant validity. Furthermore, the SKS was significantly and positively associated with teacher reports on students' empathy, social skills, and peer acceptance. Analyses by gender and grade indicated that girls perceived significantly higher levels of kindness in school than did boys, and that students' perceptions of kindness in school decreased from fourth to eighth grade, with fourth-grade students reporting the highest levels of kindness in school and eighth-grade students reporting the lowest levels. The theoretical importance of investigating students' perceptions of kindness in the school context and the practical implications of this research for informing educational efforts to promote social and emotional competencies in school communities are discussed. C 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Factor Structure, Measurement Invariance, Criterion Validity, and Reliability of the School Kindness Scale: Turkish Middle School Sample

“…The aim of the present study was to execute the Turkish adaptation of the SKS, developed by Binfet et al (2016) for students in Grades 4 to 8, to examine the factorial structure (EFA and CFA) and criterion validity of the scale and to obtain additional evidence for its reliability. For this purpose, two studies were conducted.…”

“…The first eigenvalue in their data was 2.57; the second eigenvalue was 0.85, confirming its unidimensional structure. Binfet et al (2016) found that the all items showed high loadings (>.50), ranging between .55 and .69. The pattern of associations of the SKS to a corpus of theoretically relevant constructs obtained via student self-reports (classroom supportiveness, optimism, happiness, prosocial and social goals, satisfaction with life, and academic self-efficacy) provided evidence for convergent validity (Binfet et al, 2016).…”

“…The aim of the present study is to adapt the SKS (Binfet et al, 2016) to Turkish and, to examine its factor structure, measurement invariance by gender, criterion validity, and reliability. For this purpose, after the translation of the scale to Turkish, two studies were performed.…”

“…For criterion validity, Middle school student version of School Climate Scale (SCS; Emmons, Haynes, & Comer, 2002), Child and Youth Resilience Scale (RS; Liebenberg, Ungar, & Van de Vijver, 2012), and the Brief Multidimensional Students' Life Satisfaction Scale (LSS; Seligson, Huebner, & Valois, 2003) were taken as criteria. Due to the notion that students' perceptions of the prevalence of kindness within school is an important indicator of school climate (Binfet et al, 2016), we included school climate as a relevant variable in the study. Based on the literature indicating the associations between kindness and well-being (Layous et al, 2012;Lyubomirsky & Layous, 2013;Otake et al, 2006), we also included life satisfaction and resilience as the two main indicators of well-being.…”

“…Items addressed students' perceptions of the frequency of kindness in their classroom and school. The scale was applied to 1,753 students (48% girls, 52% boys) studying in Grades 4 to 8 by Binfet et al (2016) and factor structure was tested with EFA and its Cronbach's alpha value was calculated as .71. The first eigenvalue in their data was 2.57; the second eigenvalue was 0.85, confirming its unidimensional structure.…”