%0 Journal Article
%T Reliability and validity of the Student Perceptions of School Cohesion Scale in a sample of Salvadoran secondary school students
%A Andrew E Springer
%A Amy McQueen
%A Guillermo Quintanilla
%A Marcela Arrivillaga
%A Michael W Ross
%J BMC International Health and Human Rights
%D 2009
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1472-698x-9-30
%X Students (n = 982) completed a self-administered questionnaire that included the SPSC scale along with measures of youth health risk behaviors based on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Exploratory factor analysis was used to assess the factor structure of the scale, and two internal consistency estimates of reliability were computed. Construct validity was assessed by examining whether students who reported low school cohesion were significantly more likely to report physical fighting and illicit drug use.Results indicated that the SPSC scale has three latent factors, which explained 61.6% of the variance: supportive school relationships, student-school connectedness, and student-teacher connectedness. The full scale and three subscales had good internal consistency (rs = .87 and ¦Á = .84 for the full scale; rs and ¦Á between .71 and .75 for the three subscales). Significant associations were found between the full scale and all three subscales with physical fighting (p ¡Ü .001) and illicit drug use (p < .05).Findings provide evidence of reliability and validity of the SPSC for the measurement of supportive school relationships in Latino adolescents living in El Salvador. These findings provide a foundation for further research on school cohesion and health risk behavior in Latino adolescents living in the U.S. and other Latin American countries.Youth risk behavior is an important indicator of the health of young people based on its association with several mortality and morbidity outcomes, including intentional injury stemming from aggression and suicidal ideation, chronic disease resulting from substance use and misuse, sexually transmitted disease, and undesired social outcomes such as unintended teenage pregnancy [1]. While the social sciences may be far from identifying an immunization against harmful behaviors connected to poor health outcomes, a growing body of literature in public health points to the importance of the
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-698X/9/30