Peer-reviewed article
Whose School Is Safe? Informant-Specific Validity in School Safety and Student Well-Being Assessment Across 63 Education Systems.
Sideridis G, Alghamdi M ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examined how reliable different sources of information are when assessing school safety and student well-being across 63 education systems with nearly 400,000 children. Researchers compared reports from children, teachers, and school principals to see which sources best predicted actual outcomes like school belonging, peer victimization, and academic achievement. The findings show that children's own reports are far more valid than adult reports for measuring children's experiences of school safety, with minimal overlap between what adults and children report about the same schools.
Key points
- Cross-informant correlations between child, teacher, and principal reports on school safety were very low (median below 0.10), indicating adults and children see school safety very differently
- Child reports accounted for 95% of explained variance in school belonging and 75% in peer victimization, with adult reports contributing almost nothing to these measures
- For academic outcomes (mathematics), the three informant sources contributed more equally, suggesting domain-specific differences in validity
- Adult proxy reports cannot be regarded as interchangeable substitutes for children's direct reports of experienced safety
- School-health surveillance and resource allocation decisions should rely on student self-reports rather than adult proxy reports alone
Limitations
The study uses cross-sectional data from a single assessment year (TIMSS 2023), which limits ability to establish causality or track changes over time. The analysis cannot explain why such large discrepancies exist between informants or what mechanisms drive the differences in validity across domains.
Abstract
Background/objectives Schools constitute the principal setting for the identification of children's psychosocial risk and the delivery of preventive support, and school-health surveillance therefore depends on informant reports. Selection of the reporting informant is constrained by feasibility, cost, and questionnaire length, which frequently preclude multi-informant assessments, and the question of whether adult and child reports index a common property has predominantly been examined in single-country designs. The present study estimated the criterion-related validity of child, teacher, and principal reports of school safety across multiple education systems, against outcomes spanning children's experience, institutional functioning, and externally assessed achievements; the estimand was thus informant-specific validity rather than cross-informant agreement. Methods TIMSS 2023 Grade 4 data from 12,955 schools in 63 education systems (395,961 children, 27,100 teacher records) were analyzed, with child, teacher, and principal reports modeled as separate informants. Students were randomly split within schools so that no student contributed both a predictor and an outcome; the split was replicated 50 times and averaged. Convergence was evaluated with a multitrait-multi-informant model, with ceiling effects and differential unreliability specified as rival explanations; informant contributions were estimated by an exact relative-importance (LMG) variance decomposition, with response surface analysis reported as a secondary characterization of directional discrepancy. Results Median school-level cross-informant correlations were below 0.10 and were not attributable to ceiling effects or to unreliability. With all three informants retained, the child report accounted for 95% (95% CI 92-97) of the informant-explained variance in school belonging and 75% (65-82) in peer victimization, but 44% (28-59) in mathematics, where the three contributions were approximately equal. These proportions were computed on a modest total: the three informant scores jointly explained between 1% and 13% of between-school variance. The pattern was robust to informant, item, covariate, and weighting specifications, and to correction for differential predictor unreliability. Conclusions Criterion-related informant validity in school safety measurement was domain-specific. For outcomes describing children's experience, adult reports contributed substantially lesser than child reports and cannot be regarded as interchangeable substitutes for children's reports of experienced safety. Because school-health surveillance, risk identification, preventive targeting, and resource allocation depend on these inputs, valid monitoring requires student self-reports rather than adult proxy reports alone.
Findings the Hub has extracted
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