Measuring School Climate Using the 2015 School Crime Supplement: Technical Report (NCES 2018-098)

This report focuses on the creation, assessment, and analysis of school climate measures from the 2015 School Crime Supplement (SCS) to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Since 1989, the student-reported data from the SCS have been used to generate national estimates of criminal and bullying victimization in schools and to evaluate differences in the prevalence of victimization over time and among different student groups. However, there is also a wide array of questions in the SCS that address student perceptions of school climate, including indicators of safety and disorder, quality of relationships with adults and peers at school, and student engagement in school. In addition to developing these measures using the SCS data, this report examines whether the school climate scores for each measure differed in expected ways among students from various subgroups.