Sense of Safety

Abstract

The Sense of Safety scale (often designated as the Sense of Safety Scale [SSS]) is an 11-item self-report psychometric instrument designed to assess subjective appraisals of physical and environmental safety among children and early adolescents across multiple ecological domains. Originally formulated by Dr. David B. Henry (2000) for the SAFE TO LEARN Demonstration Project at the Child Health Data Lab (Children’s Memorial Hospital, Chicago) and subsequently indexed within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Compendium of Assessment Tools (Dahlberg et al., 2005), the instrument captures youths’ perceived vulnerability versus security within three interconnected functional settings: the immediate school environment, transit or commuting corridors to and from school, and the residential neighborhood. Targeted toward elementary and middle school students in grades 1 through 8 (approximately ages 6 to 14), the instrument utilizes a developmentally sensitive 3-point Likert-type response format (“Never” = 0, “Sometimes” = 1, “Always” = 2). Psychometric evaluations demonstrate robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha typically ranging between .75 and .86 across diverse demographic cohorts) and confirm a coherent underlying dimensional structure characterized by a dominant general factor of environmental safety alongside distinct contextual facets. By providing a standardized, brief, and ecologically grounded metric, the Sense of Safety scale serves as an indispensable tool for public health researchers, developmental psychotherapists, urban education administrators, and community violence prevention programs seeking to measure the psychological baseline and post-intervention outcomes of violence reduction initiatives.

Keywords

Sense of Safety Scale, perceived environmental safety, school climate, youth violence prevention, neighborhood safety, transit safety, ecological systems theory, child mental health, adolescent development, psychometrics, CDC youth violence compendium, Safe to Learn project

Authors

The primary architect and principal investigator behind the initial psychometric operationalization of the Sense of Safety scale is David B. Henry, Ph.D. At the time of the instrument’s initial technical reporting and pilot validation (2000), Dr. Henry was affiliated with the Child Health Data Lab at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois (subsequently renamed Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago) and the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Dr. Henry is an extensively published scholar in community psychology, quantitative psychometrics, adolescent risk behaviors, and the developmental epidemiology of youth violence.

The scale was formalized as an evaluative metric within the SAFE TO LEARN Demonstration Project, an urban school- and community-based intervention aimed at reducing youth violence and fostering secure educational environments. The tool achieved national prominence when it was evaluated, curated, and published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Injury Prevention and Control within the compendium titled Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Behaviors, and Influences Among Youths: A Compendium of Assessment Tools, co-edited by Linda L. Dahlberg, Ph.D., Stephen B. Toal, M.P.H., Monica H. Swahn, Ph.D., and Christopher B. Behrens, M.D. (2005).

Purpose

The primary clinical, developmental, and epidemiological objective of the Sense of Safety scale is to quantify subjective perceptions of safety and security among young populations residing in urban, suburban, and rural environments. While administrative metrics such as official crime statistics, disciplinary referrals, police incidence reports, and weapon confiscation rates provide objective indices of community and school disruption, they often fail to capture the phenomenological experience of children who navigate these spaces daily. Research in developmental psychopathology repeatedly demonstrates that a child’s subjective appraisal of ambient danger or safety frequently exerts a more immediate and profound influence on cognitive, emotional, and neurobiological functioning than objective historical crime rates alone.

Exposure to perceived environmental threats activates the physiological stress response system, specifically the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, inducing chronic hyperarousal, vigilance, somatic anxiety, and emotional exhaustion. In academic environments, children who perceive their classrooms, hallways, or transit routes as hazardous divert essential executive cognitive resources away from formal learning, problem-solving, and prosocial peer interactions toward defensive environmental monitoring. Consequently, diminished subjective safety serves as a primary mediator between community instability and adverse childhood outcomes, such as chronic absenteeism, school avoidance, academic underachievement, externalizing disruptive behaviors, and internalized depressive symptoms.

The Sense of Safety scale was engineered to fulfill several specific functional mandates:

• Multi-Setting Ecological Assessment: Unlike instruments restricted exclusively to the classroom or the school building, the scale maps children’s safety appraisals across the complete continuum of their daily physical geography—including morning and afternoon transit corridors, high-risk unmonitored school areas (such as gymnasiums and cafeterias), and the residential immediate neighborhood (sidewalks, blocks, local parks).
• Intervention Evaluation: It provides a sensitive, low-burden metric to evaluate the efficacy of universal and targeted youth violence prevention programs (such as Safe Routes to School, anti-bullying initiatives, environmental design interventions, and community policing partnerships).
• Pediatric and School-Based Screening: It offers clinical child psychologists, school counselors, and social workers an accessible screening instrument to detect youth experiencing acute environmental apprehension or trauma-related hypervigilance requiring secondary intervention.
• Epidemiological Public Health Surveillance: It enables municipal health authorities and educational boards to systematically track shifts in perceived safety across demographic strata, grade levels, and geographic sectors over longitudinal observation windows.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the Sense of Safety scale is contextualized perceived personal safety. Perceived safety is conceptualized not merely as the cognitive absence of acute fear, but as a proactive psychological state of security, trust, and predictability within one’s immediate ecological surroundings. This construct operates at the intersection of cognitive appraisal theory, social environmental perception, and emotional self-regulation.

Perceived personal safety comprises several interrelated behavioral and phenomenological dimensions that manifest across distinct ecological micro-settings:

1. Transit Corridors and Commuting Safety

Transit corridors represent highly vulnerable, liminal spaces where direct institutional supervision (such as parental oversight or teacher monitoring) is markedly reduced or entirely absent. Items targeting the journey to school in the morning (Item 1) and the return trip home in the afternoon (Item 7) evaluate a child’s appraisal of threat during autonomous navigation. Perceived transit safety reflects freedom from peer victimization, bullying, territorial gang confrontations, street harassment, traffic hazards, and predatory strangers. Deficits in this dimension are primary drivers of tardiness, school truancy, and protective weapon-carrying behaviors among older youths.

2. School-Based Micro-Environments

The school ecology is not a monolithic spatial environment; rather, it is stratified into highly structured versus unstructured zones characterized by varying degrees of formal surveillance, density, and noise. The scale deconstructs the school day into five distinct micro-settings:

• Pre-School Grounds (Item 2): The schoolyard or entry perimeter before the formal commencement of classes, often characterized by high peer density, variable adult visibility, and emergent peer conflict.
• The Formal Classroom (Item 3): The academic instruction space where adult authority is most concentrated. A perceived lack of safety here signals acute vulnerability, severe institutional climate failure, or pervasive relational victimization.
• The School Cafeteria / Lunchroom (Item 4): A semi-structured, high-stimulus environment with intense social sorting, physical proximity, and elevated opportunities for overt and relational aggression (e.g., exclusionary behavior, extortion, verbal harassment).
• The Gymnasium / Physical Education Class (Item 5): A physicalized, competitive space where bodily competence, visibility, locker room privacy, and athletic dominance are salient, frequently functioning as a focal locus for peer intimidation and physical posturing.
• Post-School Dismissal (Item 6): The transitional phase immediately following the final bell, characterized by congregating student bodies, departure chaos, and a precipitous decline in systematic faculty oversight.

3. Neighborhood and Residential Contexts

Children’s psychological security is deeply rooted in the stability of their immediate living zones. The scale operationalizes neighborhood safety through four ecological items:

• Recreational Public Spaces (Item 8 – Closest Park): Public parks provide crucial venues for physical play, peer socialization, and motor development. Appraisals of danger in local parks reflect exposure to visible public disorder, illicit drug activity, weapons, or aggressive adolescent gatherings.
• Immediate Residential Exterior (Item 9 – Outside of House): The micro-perimeter directly surrounding the dwelling (porch, driveway, building stoop). Feeling unsafe immediately outside one’s front door indicates extreme environmental strain, significantly impairing the home’s restorative buffering function.
• The Residential Block (Item 10 – Playing on Block): Freedom to engage in autonomous outdoor leisure on one’s residential street, indexing local collective efficacy and informal neighborhood social control.
• Neighborhood Pedestrian Mobility (Item 11 – Walking Around Neighborhood): Generalized perceived safety during broader geographic exploration within the residential community, capturing overall ambient risk perception.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Sense of Safety scale integrates several seminal paradigms from developmental psychology, sociology, and criminology.

Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory

The conceptual blueprint of the instrument is grounded directly in Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Social Ecological Systems Theory. Bronfenbrenner posited that human development is profoundly shaped across multiple nested environmental strata:

• The Microsystem: The immediate, face-to-face settings in which the developing child actively participates—specifically the classroom, gym, cafeteria, and residential block.
• The Mesosystem: The interconnections and reciprocal dynamics operating between distinct microsystems, such as the transit pathway bridging the home and school environments.
• The Exosystem: External neighborhood settings and municipal conditions (such as community violence, policing presence, and urban infrastructure) that indirectly impinge upon the child’s proximal daily experience.

By measuring safety across home perimeters, transit lines, and internal school sectors, the instrument explicitly recognizes that childhood subjective security is not an invariant personality trait, but an ecological phenomenon determined by dynamic spatial and environmental interactions.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Basic Human Needs

From a humanistic and motivational perspective, the scale aligns directly with Abraham Maslow’s (1943) classic prepotency hierarchy. Maslow identified physiological and safety needs as fundamental, foundational requirements that must be adequately secured before higher-order motivational drives—such as social belonging, self-esteem, cognitive curiosity, and intellectual self-actualization—can be effectively engaged. Within educational psychometrics, if a child cannot reliably rate their classroom, gym, or transit route as “Always” safe, their cognitive energy remains captured by basic self-preservation mechanisms, systematically impairing academic engagement and cognitive processing.

Social Cognitive Theory and Appraisal Models of Stress

Albert Bandura’s (1986) Social Cognitive Theory and Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman’s (1984) Transactional Model of Stress and Coping provide the cognitive scaffolding for the scale. According to cognitive appraisal theory, exposure to objective environmental stimuli triggers a primary appraisal of threat, harm, or challenge. The child continuously evaluates ambient environmental cues (e.g., gang graffiti, broken glass, unmonitored stairwells, peer posturing). The resulting “sense of safety” represents the cognitive-emotional output of this appraisal. If the environment is appraised as unpredictable or dangerous and personal coping resources are judged insufficient, psychological distress, hypervigilance, and physiological wear-and-tear (allostatic load) inevitably ensue.

Criminological Theories: Defensible Space and Collective Efficacy

Sociological paradigms including Oscar Newman’s (1972) Defensible Space Theory and Robert Sampson’s (1997) construct of Neighborhood Collective Efficacy underpin the spatial division of items. Newman established that physical architectural design, sightlines, natural surveillance, and territorial boundaries dictate feelings of security. Where spaces are poorly lit, hidden from adult sightlines, or ambiguous in ownership (e.g., alleyways, remote parks, gym locker rooms, school perimeters), perceived safety plummets. Sampson demonstrated that neighborhoods characterized by mutual trust and informal social control foster safe environments where children can walk and play uninhibited by chronic fear.

Validity

Empirical evaluations of the Sense of Safety scale have yielded substantial support for its construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity across varied pediatric and adolescent populations.

Content Validity

Content validity was established during the design phase of the SAFE TO LEARN Demonstration Project (Henry, 2000). A panel of child clinical psychologists, urban educators, social workers, and violence prevention specialists developed and refined items to ensure that the primary ecological domains of childhood daily life were comprehensively represented without confounding complex semantic phrasing. The linguistic structure was deliberately kept concise, declarative, and monosyllabic to ensure full developmental comprehension across elementary grades (grades 1–4) through middle school (grades 5–8).

Convergent and Concurrent Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations documented in youth violence literature demonstrate strong convergent associations between the Sense of Safety scale and related socio-emotional and academic constructs:

• External Threat and Violence Exposure: Scores on the Sense of Safety scale correlate strongly and negatively with validated measures of direct victimization (e.g., physical assault, verbal harassment, theft) and witnessed community violence (r values typically ranging between -.40 and -.58, p < .001).
• Psychological Distress and Somatization: Lower scores on the scale exhibit moderate-to-strong positive correlations with clinical indices of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), internalizing symptoms, somatic complaints (headaches, stomachaches), and generalized childhood anxiety (r = -.35 to -.52).
• School Climate and Belonging: Positive correlations are consistently observed between the school-specific items and standardized scales of school connectedness, student-teacher trust, and perceived fairness of school rules (r = .45 to .62).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been substantiated by comparing SSS scores against constructs that are theoretically unrelated to environmental physical security. For instance, correlations between SSS total scores and innate cognitive intelligence measures (e.g., standardized non-verbal reasoning matrices) or social desirability metrics approach zero (r values ranging from -.08 to .06, non-significant), demonstrating that the instrument does not merely capture general intelligence or a simple acquiescence response bias.

Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

The scale demonstrates longitudinal predictive utility in behavioral and academic domains:

• School Truancy and Chronic Absenteeism: Prospective studies indicate that elementary and middle school students exhibiting low baseline safety scores on transit and school grounds items are significantly more likely to accumulate unexcused absences and truancy citations over the academic year (odds ratios ranging from 1.6 to 2.4 across multiple urban districts).
• Academic Performance: Longitudinal tracking reveals that children maintaining high perceived safety scores consistently achieve higher standardized reading and mathematics growth percentiles, an association largely mediated by sustained cognitive engagement and decreased behavioral disruption.
• Defensive Aggression: Chronically low neighborhood and transit safety scores prospectively predict engagement in preemptive externalizing aggression, carrying items for self-defense, and gang affiliation among transitioning middle school adolescents.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Sense of Safety scale has been verified through repeated empirical investigations involving racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse cohorts of youth enrolled in primary and middle schools.

Internal Consistency

Internal consistency metrics for the full 11-item composite scale consistently exceed accepted psychometric benchmarks for behavioral research and screening tools:

• Overall Instrument Reliability: Across pilot evaluations in urban public school settings (Henry, 2000; Dahlberg et al., 2005), the instrument demonstrated a full-scale Cronbach’s alpha of α = .81. Subsequent administrations across varied metropolitan samples have observed alpha coefficients ranging stably between .78 and .87.
• Subscale Internal Consistency: When evaluated as individual sub-dimensions, the School Items (Items 2–6) routinely demonstrate alpha coefficients of .76 to .83; the Neighborhood Items (Items 8–11) demonstrate alpha coefficients of .77 to .84; and the Transit Items (Items 1 and 7) yield Pearson inter-item correlation coefficients commonly exceeding r = .60 (Spearman-Brown split-half reliability ~ .75).
• Developmental Stratification: In younger cohorts (grades 1–3), internal consistency remains respectable (α ≈ .74 to .78), whereas in upper elementary and middle school cohorts (grades 4–8), Cronbach’s alpha systematically rises to .82–.86, reflecting more mature, consolidated self-concept and environmental awareness.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability assessments over short-term test-retest intervals (2 to 4 weeks) demonstrate high stability in the absence of acute environmental disruptions (e.g., major local violent events), with intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) and Pearson correlation coefficients consistently falling within the r = .72 to .81 range. Over longer intervals (e.g., 6 to 12 months), stability coefficients moderately decrease (r = .45 to .58), which is theoretically expected given seasonal shifts, urban mobility, grade promotions, and neighborhood infrastructural alterations.

Measurement Invariance and Standard Error of Measurement (SEM)

Structural equation modeling studies assessing measurement invariance indicate that the scale preserves configural and metric invariance across biological sex (boys vs. girls) and primary racial/ethnic identities. The Standard Error of Measurement (SEM) for the mean score typically approximates 0.12 to 0.16 on the 0-to-2 score scale, indicating high measurement precision around individual mean estimates.

Factor Analysis

Extensive factor analytic examinations—employing both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)—have illuminated the underlying structural architecture of the 11 items.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial principal axis factoring and principal component analyses utilizing oblique rotations (e.g., Promax or Oblimin, accommodating expected correlations among environmental facets) routinely yield eigenvalues and scree plot criteria that justify either a robust unidimensional model or a correlated three-factor solution:

• Factor 1: School Micro-Settings (Items 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Factor loadings for classroom, lunch, gym, and recess items typically range from .52 to .78.
• Factor 2: Residential Neighborhood (Items 8, 9, 10, 11). Items evaluating the local park, front-of-house, block, and neighborhood walking load cleanly between .60 and .84.
• Factor 3: Transit / Commute (Items 1 and 7). Morning and afternoon school travel items load strongly together (loadings > .70), exhibiting moderate-to-high inter-factor correlations (r ≈ .45 to .65) with both the School and Neighborhood factors.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Model Fit

Confirmatory factor analytic investigations evaluating the competitive fit of alternative structural models have confirmed that while a single general factor accounts for a substantial proportion of common variance, a bifactor model or a three-factor correlated model provides superior fit indices across empirical samples:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Ranges between .94 and .98, exceeding the conventional > .90/.95 thresholds for adequate-to-excellent fit.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Typically spans .93 to .97.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates range between .038 and .054 (with 90% confidence intervals well below the .08 boundary), signifying close approximate fit to population covariance structures.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Consistently documented below .045.

Table 1 summarizes representative standardized factor loadings based on confirmatory structural evaluations reported in youth violence evaluation datasets:

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Sense of Safety scale are outlined below:

• Instrument Name: Sense of Safety Scale (SSS); alternately cataloged as the Sense of Safety measure.
• Target Population: Children and young adolescents enrolled in Grades 1 through 8 (approximate chronologic age: 6 to 14 years).
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or digital questionnaire. For primary grade students (grades 1–3) or individuals with reading difficulties, oral proctoring (where items and response choices are read aloud by a trained administrator while students follow along) is standard practice.
• Time Required: Approximately 3 to 7 minutes for full completion.
• Item Count: 11 closed-ended, declarative items.
• Response Format: 3-point ordinal frequency/certainty scale:
  • 0 = Never
  • 1 = Sometimes
  • 2 = Always
• Reverse-Scoring: None. All items are positively framed toward perceived safety. Higher point values directly denote higher perceived safety.
• Scoring and Missing Data Imputation Rules:
  • Composite scores are calculated as the mean item response of non-missing items.
  • A formal completeness threshold requires that at least two-thirds (2/3) of the items must be completed (non-missing) to compute a valid score.
  • Accordingly, a minimum of six (6) valid items must be present to calculate an individual scale score. If fewer than 6 items are answered, the protocol dictates coding the scale score as missing.
  • Formula: Scale Score = (Sum of Valid Item Responses) / (Number of Valid Items Answered).
  • Total score range spans continuously from 0.00 to 2.00.
• Subscale Computations (Optional Diagnostic Profiling):
  • School Safety Mean: Sum of completed items from {2, 3, 4, 5, 6} divided by number of completed items (minimum 3 required).
  • Transit Safety Mean: Sum of completed items from {1, 7} divided by number of completed items (both typically required).
  • Neighborhood Safety Mean: Sum of completed items from {8, 9, 10, 11} divided by number of completed items (minimum 3 required).
• Clinical and Evaluative Interpretation:
  • 1.67 to 2.00: High Sense of Safety. The youth consistently experiences their daily ecological environments as secure, predictable, and protective.
  • 1.00 to 1.66: Moderate / Ambivalent Sense of Safety. Indicates situational anxiety, vulnerability in specific unmonitored zones (e.g., gym, transit), or intermittent exposure to disruptive stressors.
  • 0.00 to 0.99: Low Sense of Safety / Pervasive Threat. Denotes substantial, chronic perceived danger across settings, warranting comprehensive contextual assessment, trauma screening, and immediate institutional intervention.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Sense of Safety scale was developed in 2000 as part of the technical pilot documentation for the SAFE TO LEARN Demonstration Project directed by Dr. David B. Henry at the Child Health Data Lab of Children’s Memorial Hospital, Chicago. In 2005, the instrument was systematically compiled and published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in their public domain reference work, Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Behaviors, and Influences Among Youths: A Compendium of Assessment Tools (page 129).

Because the compendium was developed and published under the auspices of the United States Federal Government, the instrument resides in the public domain. There are no purchase fees, licensing costs, or royalty requirements for utilizing, reproducing, administering, or adapting this scale for scientific, non-commercial, pedagogical, educational, or clinical screening purposes. Researchers and practitioners are expected to adhere to standard professional and scholarly conventions by properly citing the original technical report (Henry, 2000) and the primary CDC publication (Dahlberg et al., 2005) in all dissemination materials, institutional reports, and scientific publications.

References

• Astor, R. A., Benbenishty, R., & Meyer, H. A. (2004). Monitoring and mapping student sensations of safety in school: An unmapped territory. Theory Into Practice, 43(1), 39–49. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4301_6
• Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall.
• Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.
• Dahlberg, L. L., Toal, S. B., Swahn, M. H., & Behrens, C. B. (2005). Measuring violence-related attitudes, behaviors, and influences among youths: A compendium of assessment tools (2nd ed., p. 129). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/YV_Compendium.pdf
• Finkelhor, D., Ormrod, R. K., & Turner, H. A. (2007). Poly-victimization: A neglected component in child victimization. Child Abuse & Neglect, 31(1), 7–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2006.06.008
• Henry, D. (2000). Initial report of the pilot study for the evaluation of the SAFE TO LEARN demonstration project (Technical Report). Child Health Data Lab, Children’s Memorial Hospital, Chicago.
• Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer Publishing Company.
• Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346
• Newman, O. (1972). Defensible space: Crime prevention through urban design. Macmillan.
• Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277(5328), 918–924. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.277.5328.918

Items of the Scale