The psychological sense of school membership among adolescents: Scale development and educational correlates

TLDR

The study develops and validates a measure of adolescents’ perceived psychological belonging to school. The authors administered an initial item pool to 755 early‑adolescent students from one suburban middle school and two urban junior high schools. The resulting 18‑item Psychological Sense of School Membership scale showed strong internal consistency, supported construct validity through subgroup differences, and correlated positively with school motivation, grades, and teacher‑rated effort, underscoring its relevance for at‑risk students.

Abstract

This article discusses the development and validation of a measure of adolescent students' perceived belonging or psychological membership in the school environment. An initial set of items was administered to early adolescent students in one suburban middle school (N = 454) and two multi-ethnic urban junior high schools (N = 301). Items with low variability and items detracting from scale reliability were dropped, resulting in a final 18-item Psychological Sense of School Membership (PSSM) scale, which had good internal consistency reliability with both urban and suburban students and in both English and Spanish versions. Significant findings of several hypothesized subgroup differences in psychological school membership supported scale construct validity. The quality of psychological membership in school was found to be substantially correlated with self-reported school motivation, and to a lesser degree with grades and with teacher-rated effort in the cross-sectional scale development studies and in a subsequent longitudinal project. Implications for research and for educational practice, especially with at-risk students, are discussed.