Effects of student and school factors on five measures of school disorder

Although concern about school disorder has increased dramatically in recent years, little systematic attention has been given to its measurement or to separating its diverse causal influences. Measures used in research have included self-reported victimization, fear, delinquency, misconduct, and school-recorded incident rates. In this paper I explore the effects of several major dimensions of school climate and individual student characteristics on five different measures of school disorder. I examine survey responses from 4,640 middle school student, using MANCOVA. Schools vary significantly on all five measures of disorder: both student characteristics and school climate variables provide significant explanatory power for each. Patterns of results vary, however, for different measures of disorder. For example, between-school effects are much stronger for students' misconduct than for more serious offending. Implications for research and policy on school disorder are discussed.