Internal Structure, Reliability and Invariance across Gender Using the Multidimensional School Climate Scale PACE-33

Abstract

The school climate is one of the keys to the efficiency, quality and improvement of the school. For this reason, numerous studies have highlighted the importance of evaluating this construct. However, there is still no measure in Spanish that evaluates the most relevant aspects of school climate in a valid and reliable way. This paper has two main objectives that try to overcome this limitation: (1) to analyse the internal structure and internal consistency reliability of the Students’ Perception of School Climate scale (escala Percepción del Alumnado sobre el Clima Escolar—PACE-33); and (2) examine its measurement and structural invariance across men and women. This study involved 1180 adolescents (mean age, Mage = 15.37 years; standard deviation, SD = 1.90) selected by means of incidental sampling. The results obtained show that, among the models tested, the one corresponding to nine correlated factors shows the best adjustment to the data; furthermore, they note that it presents adequate internal consistency indices. The results also prove that this model is equivalent in men and women. These data support that the PACE-33 is a valid and reliable measure to assess the adolescents’ perception of the main aspects of the school climate.