The development of an instrument to measure school readiness for a prevention program

There is a need to understand how environmental characteristics of a school influence the effectiveness of prevention efforts. Although researchers have discussed the importance of conducting needs assessments before implementing interventions, few of these types of assessments focus on the relational aspect. Furthermore, few assessments have the appropriate psychometric evidence to support that they are reliably assessing an environmental concept (e.g., a construct at the school level versus at the individual level). To fill this void, we developed a scale assessing the level of school problems and the quality of relationships among principals, teachers and students. Test data were collected from 368 teachers in 37 schools who participated in a randomised controlled trial of a violence prevention program. The many-faceted Rasch rating scale model was used to analyse the data. Information on construct dimensionality, school-level reliability, internal consistency, concurrent validity and predictive validity indicated satisfactory psychometric properties for this measure. We discuss contributions of this study to the measurement of school settings and the potential benefit of implementing more effective school-based interventions by collecting this type of baseline information. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.