Measuring School Climate among Japanese Students—Development of the Japan School Climate Inventory (JaSC)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This research excel at outlining the presentation of study, methods, findings, and recommendations. The methods and study were ethically conducted and executed. The effectiveness of the demonstration of content, literature, and flow describes the problem and attempts to respond to it and attempts to respond to it. 

I commend the authors for embarking on the effort to respond to the problem by creating a scale that is culturally appropriate to their needs and still takes into consideration the need to measure school climate for impact on school academic outcomes. Well done. 

Area of minor additions:

1) Given the study was tested on one cultural group, it is important that the authors speak to this limitation 

2) There was no mention of the school type. It would be good to know if the schools were public, or private schools. The quality of resources available to them is important.  

3) I wonder if a section can be added about parental impact since this group was surveyed

4) 4) Consider testing the instrument in another country and school types to find out its ultimate effectiveness.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper focuses on the school climate, a very relevant topic in the scope of School Psychology, presenting a psychometric contribution, as it develops a scale to measure this variable.

It does a good review of the literature and the statistical analyzes are adequate.

Taking into account the objective of the article, the methodology used is adequate and the statistical analyzes made are correct, as well as the analysis of the results obtained.

The study of the relationship between the results obtained in this scale and the bullying is important, namely because the school climate can be preventive in relation to bullying among students.

However, as the authors refer at the beginning of the article, “The construct of school climate can be traced back more than 100 years” and “A number of scales have been developed and validated for school climate research], many of which measure the students' perception of school climate ”. Thus, the study is not very original.

Having several scales used in different countries, it would be preferable to have adapted one of them for Japan, in order to be able to compare the results obtained in this country, with the results obtained in other countries regarding the school climate.

In addition, although the sample has an adequate number of participants, they all belong to the same city in Japan, and do not constitute a representative sample of Japanese students.

The conclusion is limited to one paragraph and can be further developed.

In addition to the mentioned aspects, I emphasize that there is no reference to an article previously published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors improved most of the aspects in which the article could be improved, so I think it can be published.