School Climate and Student Fear: The Roles of Students and Teachers

Citation

The content featured in this video is based on the following publication:

Abad, D., Almanza, M.G., Melde, Cobbina, J. & Heinze, J. (2020). A modified approach to in-school victimization, authoritative school climate, and student feelings of safety. Journal of Crime and Justice 44(4), 497-513. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0735648X.2020.1810740

Transcript

Dr. Chris Melde: My name is Chris Melde, Professor in the School of Criminal Justice as well as a subject matter expert for the for the National Center for School Safety where I’m also a Co-Investigator.

Matthew Almanza: My name is Matthew Almanza, and I am a doctoral candidate in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University.

Daniel Abad: My name is Daniel Abad, and I am a 5th-year doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University.

Matthew: Our paper explored the factors that influence student feelings of safety, specifically how afraid students are of being victimized at school.

Daniel: Authoritative school climate was developed out of the parenting literature and can best be described as a school environment that has high structure and high support for youth. The fear of crime model used is based upon Ferraro’s risk assessment framework and this study extends the model while also testing it on a sample of adolescents from a high-crime area.

Matthew: We wanted to understand how prior victimization experiences at school, the amount of disorder in school (this includes things like students bullying each other, gangs in school, and drugs), their perceived risk of being victimized, and the whether the climate of the school was authoritative changed how afraid students were at school.

The project was funded by the National Institute of Justice and was focused on examining student feelings of safety when they transitioned schools in the city of Flint, Michigan.

Daniel: This was a mixed-methods, longitudinal study. The project consisted of a survey as well as one-on-one interviews with students. The quantitative data from the project is what we used in the article. This article was recently accepted and published in the Journal of Crime & Justice.

Matthew: When we looked at some of the things that students were telling us, we were really interested in understanding the factors that made students feel safe at school. This led us to a 2018 paper by Ben Fisher and colleagues published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice which we felt was a great starting point as to thinking about how things at school affect how afraid students feel while they’re at school.

Consistent with prior research, our study found that student perceptions of school disorder and their perceived risk of being victimized at school are the biggest factors influencing student’s fear of being victimized at school. Surprisingly, we found that authoritative school climate (Students being treated fairly by teachers, or teachers treating students with respect) did not significantly reduce student levels of fear or victimization at school.

Dr. Melde: Yeah, I think a key takeaway from this research for the field is that when you think about school climate that there’s multiple facets of school climate. And really in taking the student’s perspective, our research would suggest that the students really differentiate between student-on-student relationships and teacher-on-student relationships. When it comes to perceptions of safety, the student-on-student relationships appear to fit our model or the model of fear of crime that’s been substantiated in the literature much better than the teacher-on-student relationships.

Daniel: Prior victimization experiences at school informed participant’s perceptions of school disorder and their estimates of the likelihood they would be victimized in the future, which in turn increased their fear. This finding is consistent with the risk assessment framework (at least partially).

Matthew: We hypothesize that the reasons for these findings are that students at this age level are more focused on student-to-student interactions that are happening at school (this can include bullying, fighting, or gangs). When it comes to their fear of being victimized, students are not necessarily connecting what the teachers and school administrators are doing in terms of creating an authoritative school climate regarding their own fears regarding victimization.

Daniel: The findings suggest that from a policy perspective, efforts by schools to improve student fear of victimization should focus on student relationships and behaviors and less on the interpersonal dynamics between students and teachers, staff, or administrators.

Research in the area of school climate should continue to study samples of youth from disadvantaged communities to better understand their experiences with school safety in high-crime areas. Also, samples that either focus on, or at the minimum include, elementary-aged youth should be pursued. Much of the previous research in this area focuses on middle school or high school-aged youth. Future research should also pursue longitudinal methods to better understand the relationships of these variables over time.

Dr. Melde: Our findings were counterintuitive at first, and especially our finding that perceptions of an authoritative school climate were positively associated with fear. That said, after thinking about what our measures indicate in the full model, our results begin to make sense. Student perceptions of safety, including their perceived risk of being victimized, have more to do with their fellow students and how they feel about those relationships than it has to do with how they feel about their relationships with teachers.  After all, teachers are not likely to be viewed as the source of threat for students. So this focus on those other student relationships really made sense.

Matthew: If you have any questions about our study you can find it on the website for the Journal of Crime and Justice. I would also recommend that taking a look at Ben Fisher and colleagues’ paper from 2018 in the American Journal of Criminal Justice and Ken Ferraro’s book from 1995 on fear and victimization. If anyone has a question regarding our study, you can contact Daneil or I by email.