Sense of School Belonging Among High School Students

This study which aims to investigate high school students’ psychological sense of school membership, carried out with 274 ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-grade students (163 female, 111 male) in three high schools representing low, middle and high socio-economic status. The Psychological Sense of School Membership (PSSM) Scale, developed by Goodenow (1993a) was used as data collection tool. Reliability and validity of the scale were also examined in this study for high school level. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test, and one-way analysis of variance were used. Results showed that although the students’ sense of school belonging were not very high, it was higher than the average point. Although significant differences were not found between PSSM scores of the students in terms of gender, female students have higher scores than male students. It was also found that there were significant differences between PSSM scores of the students in terms of grade level, academic achievement, and socio-economic status in the high school they were attending.