Background:
Schools, as communities, may develop shared capacities to respond to children’s need of safe and secure environments.
Aims:
To develop and explore the psychometric properties of an instrument to evaluate a new multidimensional construct, School Resilience, in four EU countries.
Methods:
The development of the construct and instrument followed a theoretical and inductive process; 328 adults (parents and teachers) answered the twenty Likert-items. The analysis followed four steps: Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses (SEM, MLR estimation, Mplus7.4) of first and second order, internal consistency and groups’ comparisons.
Results:
EFA verified the existence of five factors over reduced models. CFA showed good parameters for the five correlated factors structure using RMSEA, SRMR, CFI, TLI (Hu and Bentler, 1999; Kline, 2013). A second-order CFA confirmed a latent high-level construct of School Resilience. Sub-scales and total scale have good or excellent internal consistency (scales α > .745; total scale α = .929).
Conclusion:
School Resilience is a collective resource of the school community to promote wellbeing and mental health. It comprises five domains, four related to the social network (relationships, participation, inclusion, and belonging) and one focused on the capacity of the school community to acknowledge their role in adolescents’ mental health.