| The university-community collaborative project pursues three interrelated goals: 1) to validate and normalize a new instrument to asseess the socio-educational environment of secondary schools (the SEZ), 2) to conduct an epidemiological study on school victimization and violence perception and, 3) to develop a standardized procedure, based upon the school socio-educational profiles, to guide and support the establishment of comprehensive and school-wide violence prevention programs. In this presentation, we will first briefly present our conceptualization of the school socio-educational environment, which integrates and distinguishes three specific dimensions: a) the quality of the different types of school climate, b) the perceptions of school problems, and c) the perception of the quality of educational practices. next, we will report the first results on the validity of the SEQ which was administered to students (N=18,500) and school personell (n-2,500) (two adapted versions) in 50 public French Canadian high schools of the Isle and the suburbs of Montreal. In addition to the self reported measures, this study included official school records on attendance, school dropout, grade retention, etc., as well as official police records on known violent incidents for each targeted schools. Results regarding the internal and discriminant validity will be presented, |
Updated 05/20/2006