My School or Our School? The Effects of Individual versus Shared School Experiences on Teacher Perceptions of Safety

While the research in the area of fear of criminal victimization among students at school continues to grow, few studies have focused on the prevalence or correlates of fear of crime at school among teachers. Using data from 1,438 teachers from 54 public high schools in Kentucky, we examined the individualand school-level predictors of teacher perceptions of school safety using hierarchical linear regression models (HLMs) of teacher perceived safety. Overall, we found that teacher perceptions of school safety were largely a function of individual Staci D. Roberts, MA (E-mail: [email protected]), and Richard R. Clayton, PhD (E-mail: [email protected]), are affiliated with the Center for Prevention Research, University of Kentucky, 121 Washington Avenue, Suite 204, Lexington, KY 40536-0003. Pamela Wilcox, PhD, is affiliated with the Division of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210389, 600 Dyer Hall, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0389 (E-mail: [email protected]). David C. May, PhD, is affiliated with the Department of Correctional and Juvenile Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University, 110 Stratton Building, 521 Lancaster Avenue, Richmond, KY 40475-3102 (E-niail: [email protected]). The authors are grateful for the contributions of Graham C. Ousey, Kimberly Reeder, Michelle Campbell-Augustine, Shayne Jones, and Jon Paul Bryan for their work on this project. This project was funded by NIDA grand DA-11317. Joumal of School Violence, Vol. 6(4) 2007 Available online at http://jsv.haworthpress.com © 2007 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.1300/J202v06n04_03 33 34 JOURNAL OF SCHOOL VIOLENCE experiences at school. Nonetheless, perceptions of safety did vary substantially across schools, and school-level characteristics accounted for part of this contextual variation. In particular, we found evidence that the incivility hypothesis-largely heretofore applied to understanding neighborhood variation in fear of crime-also extended to teachers nested within school settings. Presence of physical disorder (measured as both individual and within-school shared perceptions of incivility) decreased teachers' perceptions of school safety, doi: 10.1300/J202v06n04_03 [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: © 2007 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved.]