FACTORIAL VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY OF THE GREEK VERSION OF SCHOOL LIFE QUESTIONNAIRE

Schools play a central role in the educational and psychosocial development of students.School experiences -especially during the early years of schooling -can have a significant impact not only on students' daily lives and general well-being, but also on their later academic, social and professional lives.In this context, students' evaluations of their school life are related, but not necessarily identical, to various socio-emotional and enduring purposes of schooling and they have a significant impact on school learning, engagement in learning, and attendance.In the Greek literature, empirical studies on the students' evaluations of the quality of their school life are rather scarce, partly due to the limited number of measures suitable for capturing the multidimensional and complex nature of students' school life quality.To this end, the purpose of the present study was to test the factorial validity and reliability of the School Life Questionnaire-Greek version (SLQ-GR).The sample consisted of 258 students in the fifth and sixth grades of primary school.Students were asked to indicate their level of agreement for each of the 40 questions of the SLQ-GR based on a 4-point Likert scale (from 1=disagree to 4=agree).Results of exploratory and confirmatory analyses revealed that 35 (out of 40 items of the original scale) were organized into seven factors, similar to the structure of the original scale, reflecting two general domains (general satisfaction and negative affect) and five subdomains (teacher-student relations, social integration, opportunities, achievement and adventure) of students' evaluations of quality of school life.Cronbach's alpha for the SLQ-GR subscales ranged from 0.63 to 0.84, while the Cronbach's alpha for the total scale was 0.92, indicating satisfactory reliability for the SLQ-GR.Overall, the results of our study provided initial support for the factorial validity and reliability of the SLQ-GR.