The Reliability and Validity of the School Success Profile

About the Book

It is an honor to write the foreword for The Reliability and Validity of the School Success Profile (SSP). The SSP stands alone as one of the truly excellent, empirically validated, comprehensive, and standardized measurement tools for schools. As a measurement instrument, the SSP offers a measure of individual student risks and assets across multiple dimensions, capturing school, neighborhood, and community contexts. I first became interested in this measure because it offered a useful way to identify and measure student assets and strengths. Since that time, I have personally used this measure in my own research projects on solution-focused therapy, and I have found the SSP to be an excellent assessment and outcome measurement tool for use in both research and applied settings. Over the past 13 years, Gary Bowen and colleagues at the University of North Carolina’s School of Social Work have developed the School Success Profile (SSP), a comprehensive assessment instrument. This standardized measure has 220 items and represents one of the best measures in the field of school and youth measurement for assessing individual students on social environment and individual adaptation across 22 dimensions. From its very inception as an outcome assessment and intervention planning tool, Bowen and colleagues and their funders have made a commitment to the ongoing psychometric and empirical development of the SSP for use in secondary and elementary schools. Validity and reliability studies on the SSP have repeatedly shown acceptable psychometric characteristics as both a research measure and as a developing clinical practice tool, but there has not been an easy way for practitioners to evaluate this information. The introduction of this monograph, The Reliability and Validity of the School Success Profile (SSP), serves as a technical manual for use of the measure and summarizes a large study on the SSP’s psychometric characteristics. This manual is further evidence of the commitment of Bowen and colleagues to the long-term development of this measure. The current monograph has most everything one would expect in a technical manual for a measurement instrument, and it also provides added online resources. The manual is well organized and provides a summary of the basic validity and reliability information as well as helpful content on scoring, administration, and limitations of the measure. It also provides some very useful practical guidelines for how and when to use the measure in a school. Most importantly, the monograph briefly summarizes the historical and theoretical development of the measure, and it provides concise details on the recent validity and reliability studies in an easy-to-read format that is straightforward for practitioners to evaluate. The manual further highlights the clinical utility of the measure by demonstrating how the scoring system is both student- and practitioner friendly, providing an example of an uncomplicated plot of scores that are color coded as green for strengths, yellow for cautions, or red for risks. The color coding scheme has considerable face validity and clinical utility and, as the manual recommends, this makes it possible for the results to be discussed with youths and other participants, for the purposes of verifying validity and intervention planning. The study reported in the manual provides continuing confidence in the reliability and validity of the SSP for intervention and outcome measurements, and it serves as an accountability document for practitioners who may be using the SSP. Although the manual appears to simplify data for practitioners, it does not neglect to provide a Web site for other studies and technical details that are made available online. This adds to the user friendliness of the manual for researchers and psychometricians interested in studying the measure and its strengths and limitations in more critical detail. Other online administration and scoring services

About the Author

Gary L. Bowen is Kenan Distinguished Professor, School of Social Work, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also a Spencer Program Faculty Member, Spencer Foundation Education Policy Research Training Program, at Duke University. With support from the William T. Grant Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, he co-directs the School Success Profile Project with Dr. Natasha Bowen. In 2001, he was made a Fellow in the National Council on Family Relations for career achievement and service in the family studies field. Dr. Bowen received the “Most Innovative Professor Award” in 2002 from the Social Work Student Organization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Bowen serves on a number of editorial boards, including the editorial boards of Evaluation and Program Planning, Journal of Community Practice, Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention, and Family Relations. Natasha K. Bowen is Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a mentor faculty member of the Center for Developmental Science. An MSW and Ph.D. graduate of the School of Social Work at UNC-Chapel Hill, she currently manages the research aspects of the development of an elementary version of the School Success Profile, the ESSP. The ESSP project is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Dr. Bowen has also conducted numerous studies for the State of North Carolina’s Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities, and Substance Abuse Services. These studies have focused on a high-risk population of children and adolescents with serious emotional disturbance. Roderick A. Rose is Research Associate at the Jordan Institute for Families, School of Social Work, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An economist by training and a new member of the School Success Profile project team, Mr. Rose has been working with professors in the School of Social Work on examining the impact of welfare reform and poverty on the school performance trajectories of disadvantaged children in North Carolina schools. He is a skillful statistician with experience in using event history analysis, logistic regression, and hierarchical linear modeling.