Psychological Unsafety in Schools: The Development and Validation of a Scale

Abstract

Work related psychological unsafety defined as the degree to which employee perceive the risky work environment that hinder them to behave comfortably or to speak up what they think without fear of its possible negative consequences. The importance of psychological unsafety has already been laid down for organizational viability and development, but the main problem is lack of instrument to measure psychological unsafety in schools. So the aim of this study is to develop valid and reliable instrument. We developed it in line with the procedures suggested by AERA (The American Educational Research Association). Based on the literature review, we wrote 27 draft items, then we piloted it on 164 school staff and we implemented factor and item analyses. We finally conducted it in the main application with 393 school staff who randomly selected from schools located in different geographical regions of Turkey. Results of EFA displayed that the 19 items loaded on three factors explaining .73 of total variance and the factor loadings ranged between .59 to .85. In addition, corrected item-total correlations ranged from .51 to .86. The internal consistency reliability coefficient was .96 and CFA confirmed the structural model. At the end of the study, we obtained a valid and reliable scale to measure psychological unsafety in schools.