Development and Validation of Welcoming School Scale (WSS) for Examining General School’s Capacity to Welcome Students with Disabilities in Pakistan

Author(s) : Muhammad Uzair-ul-Hassan, Iram Parveen & Haroon ur Rasheed

Abstract:

Multidimensional self-report Welcoming School Scale (WSS) was developed and validated to examine general school’s capacity to intake students with disabilities. A pool including 46 items was created. In order to analyze factor structure, 23 items were chosen from the pool in viewing experts’ opinion. A sample of 430 teachers with various educational backgrounds was randomly selected. Twenty three items of Welcoming School Scale (WSS) were submitted to principal components analysis by using varimax rotation. A solution of four factors was obtained on the basis of eigenvalues and associated scree plot. The contents of the items were examined in detail with > .30 factor loadings on four factors in rotated solution by following the criteria of Kline (1986). The rotated factor solution was found to be more meaningful for the theoretical explanation of the factors, which produced the four subscales of Welcoming School Scale. For these four aspects eigenvalues were 3.13, 2.70, 1.96 and 1.82, respectively. The final Welcoming School Scale (WSS with 19 items) was found to be internally consistent as shown by value of alpha coefficient .71. The study also focused to explore the difference on mode of welcoming school with respect to various demographic variables. This study also measured differences between different age groups of teachers on WSS. The difference was examined with the help of t- test and ANOVA respectively and significant differences were found for three age groups. Results from t-test analyses produced considerable difference between males and females teachers on WSS, t (378) =5.36, p< .000. Male teachers showed significant and higher score on WSS as compared to female teachers. It has been concluded that future researchers may use WSS to analyze the welcoming and in-taking capacity of general school for students with disabilities along with their counterparts without disabilities.

Key words: Welcoming school scale, validation, principal component analysis, capacity for diversity