Teachers’ Concerns Regarding Touching Their Students in the Classroom: A Scale Development Study

This study details the development of the “Classroom Touch Concern Scale” (CTC), which was designed to measure individual differences among teachers regarding their feelings of concern when touching students in the classroom. The CTC incorporates two correlated dimensions: CTC associated with touching students of the same gender and CTC associated with touching students of a different gender. Studies 1 through 7 used various samples of university faculty and high school teachers to investigate the CTC with regard to item development, dimensionality, construct validity, linguistic validity, predictive validity, discriminant validity, and convergent validity. The results showed that the CTC has high internal consistency reliability and an acceptable to good construct validity, a good discriminant and convergent validity, linguistic validity, and predictive validity. We discuss the practical implications and limitations of using the CTC