ICCS 2009 Technical Report - IEA

Question 9 presented students with 10 items conveying a series of situations involvingclassmates that they might witness at school. Students were asked to express how they feltabout the events depicted (“I think it’s fun,” “I don’t care,” “It bothers me”). All 10 itemswere used to derive the scale students’ feelings of empathy toward classmates (EMPATH). The scalereliability was 0.87 for the pooled ICCS sample, and the national reliabilities ranged from 0.83to 0.93 (see Table 12.56). Table 12.57 shows the item wording and the item parameters thatwere used for scaling. Students who scored highly on this scale were students who expressed agreater degree of empathy toward their classmates.Question 10 asked students to indicate how often they themselves had experienced acts ofphysical and/or verbal abuse in the past month (“never,” “only once,” “two to four times,” “fivetimes or more”). The five question items were used to form the scale students’ personal experienceof physical and verbal abuse at school (EXPAGG). The scale had a reliability (Cronbach’s alpha)of 0.73 for the pooled ICCS sample; national reliabilities ranged from 0.72 to 0.75 (see Table12.56). Table 12.57 shows the item wording as well as the item parameters that were used forscaling. Higher values on this scale reflect more frequent experiences with physical and verbalaggression at school.The results of the confirmatory factor analysis for these item sets appear in Figure 12.30.The four-factor solution had a close model fit, while the size of the factor loadings indicatedhigh measurement reliability at the item level. Correlations between the latent factors tendedto be weak. Only ATTVIOL (attitudes toward the use of violence) and EMPATH (feelings ofempathy) had a strong negative correlation, indicating that students who felt more empatheticwere also more likely to reject the use of violence.Students’ reports on discussion of civic issues at schoolQuestion 12 asked students to indicate how often (“not at all,” “a little, “sometimes,” “often”)a series of civic issues were discussed at their school. The nine items stating these issueswere used to form the scale students’ reports on frequency of discussions about civic issues at school(SCHDISC). The scale reliability was 0.84 for the pooled ICCS sample, and the nationalreliabilities ranged from 0.82 to 0.85 (see Table 12.58). The item parameters that were used forscaling are shown in Table 12.59.Figure 12.31 shows the results from the confirmatory factor analysis of this item set. The onefactorsolution had a good model fit. The factor loading for Item LS2P12A (“rights and dutiesof citizens”) indicated a somewhat lower reliability for this item than for others, with only 35percent of its variance explained by the latent factor.SCALING PROCEDURES FOR ICCS questionnaire ITEMS247