Home > Codebook > Measures > Sanctioning Practices and Institutional Climate - Subject Release

Sanctioning Practices and Institutional Climate - Subject Release

This measure appears in the following time-points: Release.

Related Construct

Description of Measure

The constructs assessed in this section of the release interview reflect important aspects of the institutional environment as identified in earlier work about conditions of confinement (Parent et al, 1994; Moos, 1997; Fagan, 1998). Constructs assessed can be split into two broad categories: 1) an accounting of the sanctioning practices of the facility and 2) an assessment of the institutional climate along several dimensions (e.g., safety, staff connectedness, organization, overall climate).

Sanctioning practices: A series of questions first establishes both the perceived and actual consequences of negative behavior within the institution. The subject is first asked to indicate the potential consequences if a resident were caught stealing, fighting, disrespecting staff, or trying to escape. The subject is then asked to indicate the number of times they were punished during their stay.

Institutional climate: Additional items assess the participant's perceived safety while at the institution (e.g., "I felt safe when a staff member was present", "I was afraid to come here"), staff negative behavior (e.g., "How often did you see the staff come to work drunk or high", "How often did you see the staff use racist comments towards residents"), staff connectedness (e.g., "Staff did a lot of individual counseling", "If a resident did well, the staff would tell him/her so personally"), organization (e.g., "The facility was always neat and clean", "We followed a regular schedule every day"), fairness (e.g., "Most of the staff were pretty fair", "The rules here were fair"), and overall institutional climate (e.g., "Staff encouraged residents to make life more pleasant for residents who did well", "Staff dealt fairly and squarely with all residents"). Participants respond on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from "Strongly disagree" to "Strongly agree".

The following scores are computed:

The following individual items are also available:

Following data collection, a series of analyses were completed using a subset of the variables noted above. The intent of these analyses were to refine the items above into a set of psychometrically sound dimensions of organizational functioning (see Mulvey, Schubert and Odgers, 2010), and to determine whether or not individual perceptions along those dimensions influenced post-release behavior (see Schubert, Mulvey, Loughran, and Losoya, 2011). In an attempt to reduce confusion, we have written a separate codebook section (Dimensions of Organizational Functioning) to describe these refined dimensions. It should be noted, however, that some of the variable names included here are similar to those included in the refined dimensions codebook. As a result, we will explicitly describe how each variable listed above differs from the variables included in the Dimensions dataset.

Sanctions

Institutional Climate

Data Issues

Sanctions

References