The data sets used in this and some previous studies belong to the Institute of Educational Research at University of Jyväskylä. The purpose of these data sets was to explore overall school satisfaction in Finland in '91 and '95. The sets contain 29 opinions to statements including ones trying to survey the overall well-being of the students and others assessing their attitude to school. This type of questionnaire has been recognized as an internationally accepted standard to measure school satisfaction. The numbers of usable data records are 1127 ('95) and 1120 ('91).
The students expressed their degree of (dis)agreement to all statements with four possible choices: definitely agree (4), mostly agree (3), mostly disagree (2) and definitely disagree (1). The statements had been divided into six categories: General satisfaction, Teacher - student relations, Status in class, Identity in class, Achievement and opportunity and Negative affect. This category structure has been verified with factor analysis using both data sets. Preprocessing of the initial data was performed in a similar way as in figure 1 using four choices. This resulted in 116 new variables.
Examples of statements:
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Statement categories:
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