The Inventory of Teacher-Student Relationships: Factor Structure, Reliability, and Validity Among African American Youth in Low-Income Urban Schools

This study investigates the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the Inventory of Teacher-Student Relationships (IT-SR), a measure that was developed by adapting the widely used Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachments (Armsden & Greenberg, 1987) for use in the context of teacher-student relationships. The instrument was field tested with a sample of African American students from low-income backgrounds (N = 171). An exploratory factor analysis was estimated with a randomly selected half of the sample. Three factors pertaining to Communication, Trust, and Alienation in relationships emerged. A confirmatory factor analysis was run on the remainder of the sample. Goodness-of-fit indices indicated that the three factor structure fit the data reasonably well. Scores on each of the three factors correlated with scores on other, existing measures of teacher-student relationship quality as well as with indicators of emotional, behavioral, and school-related adjustment. Implications for research on teacher-student relationships are discussed.