Investigation of the sense of school belonging, peer attachment and empathic classroom atmosphere among secondary school students

This study examines the sense of school belonging, peer attachment and empathic classroom atmosphere among secondary school students. The statistical relationships between these three variables also investigated in the study. Research population includes sixth, seventh and eighth grade students which proceeds their secondary school from Adana central districts in 2011-2012 school year. Three schools, which were identified as lower, middle and upper social economic status by unbiased cluster sampling method, is selected from the research population. The research is conducted on 602 students; 207 of them from the school which has low socio-economic status, 205 of them from the school which has middle socioeconomic status and, 190 of them from the school which has high socio-economic status. Data were gathered by three different tools in this research. Psychological Sense of School Membership Scale (PSSM) (Goodenow, 1993) ?Empathic Classroom Atmosphere Scale? (ECAS) (Özbay and Şahin, 2000), ?The Inventory of Peer Attachment? (IPA) (Hortaçsu, Oral and Yasak-Gültekin, 1991). In data analysis, descriptive statistics were examined by means of SPSS 11.5 package software. Furthermore, independent samples t-test and multiple regression analysis were used. In evaluating the findings in being significant or not 05 significance level is determined as the criteria. It is identified before these are done that the sample meets the premises for ?linearity? and ?normality?. According to findings of PSSM sense of school belonging level in secondary schools in Adana central districts is above average accordingly in both total points and sub dimensions. In socio-economical relationships, sense of school belonging in students of upper socio- economic status schools is higher than the sense of school belonging of lower and middle socio-economic status school students. The results of the study indicated that there are significant relationships between the sense of school belonging and variables of attachment to friends and empathic classroom atmosphere in secondary school students. Furthermore, sense of school belonging levels was predicted significantly by the variables of peer attachment and empathic classroom atmosphere. The order of importance in precursor variables on sense of school belonging is as peer attachment and empathic classroom atmosphere.