DEVELOPING THE SCHOOL SAFETY SCALE

School safety highlights ensuring safety through avoidance of any dangers by school staff, and decreasing teacher-student anxiety about safety through positive interpersonal relationship establishment and creating a safe climate. In this context, the purpose of this study was to develop a scale to determine school safety level. The scale was developed following the application of a draft form which was based on a comprehensive literature review and expert views to primarily 210 teachers and 415 later, employed in schools of Van province and districts. Principal component analysis, a factor analysis technique, was employed for the construction validity of the scale and the determined construction was also confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis. Cronbach Alpha coefficient was calculated for reliability study. Moreover, item total correlations were examined for item discrimination of each one. It was concluded that the scale, which was named as “the School Safety Scale” (SSS), was a valid, reliable measurement tool to be employed to measure school safety by teachers in educational institutions. The 27-item scale had the following four factors: situational, actual/phenomenal, preventive and internal. The scale was a five point Likert-type agreement scale