Design and Initial Psychometric Evaluation of the Multidimensional School Social Climate Inventory for Educational...

Educational assistants remain underrepresented in multidimensional assessments of school social climate. This study developed the Multidimensional School Social Climate Inventory for Educational Assistants (MSSCI-EA) and examined initial evidence regarding its content validity, internal structure, and internal consistency. Instrument development involved a systematic review, item generation, expert judgment, and pilot testing. The main study included 871 educational assistants from 91 Chilean schools. Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA) was conducted using Spearman correlations, GLASSO network estimation, and Louvain community detection. Internal consistency was estimated using Cronbach's alpha and McDonald's omega based on Pearson correlations. Item stability was examined through 1000 bootstrap resamples, and hierarchical EGA assessed whether a unidimensional higher-order structure could support an overall score. The retained solution comprised 90 items across 12 dimensions. Both alpha and omega ranged from 0.773 to 0.957. Average item stability, calculated according to the final dimension assignments, ranged from 0.252 to 1.000. Hierarchical EGA identified five higher-order communities and did not support a unidimensional interpretation of an overall total score. These findings provide initial psychometric evidence for the MSSCI-EA. Further evaluation of the less stable item groupings and independent confirmation of the dimensional structure are needed.