A Cross-Cultural Comparison of US and Chinese Students' Perceptions of School Safety

Abstract

There is currently a lack of international cross-cultural research that compares students’ perception of school safety. To address this, the current study compared US and Chinese high school students’ perception of school safety. Participants (N= 5,377) were recruited from three high schools in China (n= 1,289) and 12 high schools in the US students (n= 4,088). To assess students’ perceptions of school safety, each student was administered the Modified Delaware School Climate Survey-Student (Yang et al., 2013), a measure that includes a school safety subscale among others. For the cross-cultural purposes of this study, the instrument was translated into Mandarin Chinese using a double-back translation method. Using independent t tests, results indicated that Chinese high school students’ perceptions of school safety were significantly higher than US peers. This finding was consistent across grade level and gender. Results are discussed in terms of important cross-cultural outlook dimensions that may account for the school safety perception differences.