Developing school resilience for disaster mitigation: a confirmatory factor analysis

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to create a valid and fit instrument to measure school resilience, and to understand teachers’ and students’ contributions to build school resilience. Design/methodology/approach The construct of school resilience is adapted from Henderson and Milstein’s (2003) concept regarding two factors: mitigating risk factor in environment and building resilience in the environment. Senior high school teachers and students in a disaster-prone area in Indonesia were chosen as the sample using purposive sampling technique. Findings The results of this research are that the instrument is considered as good, valid, reliable, and fit for measuring the students’ and the teachers’ contributions in building school resilience; and the results of the confirmatory factor analysis test of the hypothesized model of school resilience of teachers and students in a disaster-prone area are in line with the empirical data. Based on the analysis of the value of the major loading factors, teachers and students show different contributions. In building school resilience for disaster mitigation, teachers begin by mitigating risk factor in the environment whereas students tend to give a priority to build resilience in the environment. Practical implications The results of this study are applicable to develop school resilience on disaster mitigation, and the instrument of the research provides a practical contribution to broader research scope, in terms of different population, school level, socio-cultural background, and disaster-prone area. Originality/value This study presents reliable instrument to measure teachers and students’ contribution in building school resilience. This study also sought to understand the different contributions shown by teachers and students in building school resilience for disaster mitigation.