School Climate and Resilience Among Secondary Students in California: A Latent Class Analysis

Background: Both school climate and resilience are linked with multiple outcomes for students. However, few studies examine how students experience the multiple dimensions of school climate (e.g. school connectedness, teacher relationships, safety). Similarly, few studies examine students’ perceptions of the many facets of resilience (e.g. problem solving, planning for the future, and self-efficacy). A better understanding of how students experience school climate and resilience has important implications for theoretical understanding and potential intervention. This study will first identify subgroups of students based on unique patterns of school climate and resilience dimensions. Second, we will explore potential relationships between subgroups of school climate and subgroups of resilience. 

Methods: Data from the 2013 California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS) were used for this analysis; a sample of 7th, 9^th, and 11^th grade students (n = 85,069) was drawn from schools across the state of California. All questions were student self-report. School climate was measured with three scales assessing school connectedness, teacher support, and meaningful participation, along with one item assessing school safety. Resilience was measured with nine items assessing goals and plans for the future, problem solving, and self-efficacy. Latent class analysis was utilized to identify student profiles based on their perceptions of school climate and resilience, separately.  Subsequently, multinomial logistic regression was then used to explore associations between class membership in school climate and resilience.

Results: A 5-class model was the best fitting model for School Climate (poor-climate, neutral, better-climate, positive teacher support, and high-climate). A 5-class model was also the best fitting model for resilience (mostly resilient, graduate HS/low skills, low-resilience, moderate-to-high, and high-resilience) Students in the graduate HS/low skills category may have plans to graduate from high school, but low self-efficacy, and problem solving, whereas students in the high-resilience class report high resilience across all domains. We then examined the relationship between school climate and resilience controlling for grade, gender, and race/ethnicity. These results reinforce the complexity of climate and resilience constructs and their relationship to each other. For example, students in the poor-climate class (vs. positive-climate) had higher odds of being in the low-resilience (vs. high-resilience) class (OR=16.84, 95% CI = 14.37-19.74). In contrast, those in the positive teacher support climate class (vs. high-climate) had increased odds to be in the graduate HS/low resilience class (vs. high-resilience) class (OR=6.80, 95% CI= 5.40, 8.57.   

Discussion: Our results emphasize the complexity of school climate and resilience. Positive perceptions of specific dimensions of school climate can potentially bolster specific dimensions of student resilience. However, it also appears that this is not a consistent influence across all domains of resilience. Independently, these models help illuminate how students simultaneously experience school climate and resilience. While there are classes of students reporting high levels of school climate and resilience, there are others who may be at risk due to low levels of these potential supports. Finally, individual variation in perceived climate and resilience has implications for school-wide and individual intervention efforts.