Sense of School Belonging: The Illusion of a School-Size Effect

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overall nice job.

Suggestions:  Line 98 - and positively related to school attendance

Line 220 - A fourth step was added, 220 indeed, we followed the suggestions by Opdenakker and Van Damme (2000a)

Consider - Following the suggestions by Opdenakker and Van Damme (2000a), a fourth step was added...

Line 273 - remove the word 'instead'

Line 421 - however,  the  (too many spaces between comma and the)

Perhaps a short paragraph in Discussion elaborating on how class size (regardless of school size) was important.  

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable suggestions.

All suggested revisions have been carried out and are visible in red in the revised manuscript.

Regarding class size, in the discussion, after the statement “Results and previous researches (e.g. Bianco & Bressoux, 2009) showed that the classroom level would have explained more than the school level in terms of variability in the sense of school belonging; however, the data collected by the MDI survey do not allow for a characterization of the classrooms and the processes that take place within them, but this is certainly a promising work hypothesis to be explored in future studies.” we added:  “In fact, recent literature in particular seems to indicate that it is the climate fostered in the classroom by the teacher and not aspects such as class size that influence the sense of belonging at school (Allen et al., 2018; Allen et al., 2022)”.

Reviewer 2 Report

The article addresses a topic of clear interest.

The sense of school belonging is a topic with notable repercussions for the students' adjustment to school.

The methodological approach carried out by the authors seems appropriate for its in-depth study.

Below I present some considerations that I think should be taken into account before publishing the article. I present them in order of importance:

1. Ethics Committee.

The research should be approved by an ethics committee.

2. Date of the bibliographical references.

There are very few bibliographical references published in recent years. In fact, the theoretical framework of the article is based on quite old works.

I think it is important to conduct a new bibliographic review, in order to help update the theoretical elements of the article.

3. Instrument.

The sense of school belonging is evaluated only through 3 items.

Since this variable is the central theme of the article, I think that some more elaborate instrument should have been used.

In any case, since this issue cannot be changed anymore, I think it should at least be mentioned in the limitations of the study.

4. Structure of the article.

The content of lines 248-261 I think is more appropriate for the discussion section than for the results section.

5. Keywords.

I propose to use the keyword "multilevel analysis" instead of "multilevel model".

I think the keyword "between-school variance" is not appropriate.

I hope that these questions are useful for the authors.

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable suggestions.

All suggested revisions have been carried out and are visible in red in the revised manuscript.

1. According to your suggestion we added the following specification at the end of the Participants and procedure section: “Students were informed that they were free to choose to participate in the re-search at any time and that they could choose whether or not to answer the questions. They were also informed regarding the confidentiality of their responses and the purpose of the research. Ethical approval from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland ethics committee has been obtained for the research.”
2. More recent bibliographical references were added (when more recent existing studies were published) and some of the oldest were eliminated.
3. The following statements were added in the Limitations of the study section: “Moreover, although the instrument used in this study to measure sense of school belonging, according to previous research is reliable (Castelli et al., 2017), it consisted of only 2 items. In order to confirm our results, it would be appropriate for future research to consider different instruments to measure the construct.”
4. The content of the indicated lines was integrated in the Discussion section, as suggested.
5. Keywords: we replaced “multilevel models” with “multilevel analysis” and we removed between-school variance from keywords.

Reviewer 3 Report

This topic is original but the litterature reviewed must be increased. Nowadays must be more refernces. Authors must try to improve this reviewed (we are in 2022 and references are so old). Besides this, the paper must introduce or study others similar cases in different countrys in order to compare similarities and diferences.

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable suggestions.

As suggested, more recent bibliographical references were added and some of the oldest were eliminated. However, some of the relationships between variables we refer to in the paper have been studied more in the past than recently. This is also the reason why some of the studies we cite are dated. Moreover, with regard to the references related to multilevel analysis, it should be borne in mind that the methodology was developed in the mid-1980s by four research teams (Mason, Wong & Entwisle, 1983; Aitkin & Longford, 1986; Goldstein, 1986; Raudenbush & Bryk, 1986) and has not changed since then. It is above all the implementation of these methods that has evolved considerably in recent years, in particular because of advances in computer science and computational resources that have greatly facilitated the performance of these analyses. But the theoretical foundations remain those of the mid-1980s.

Regarding your second suggestion, as explained in the paper (see lines 404-408) studies that have dealt with the effect of school size using a multilevel analysis also considering the intermediate class level are rare and do not exist concerning the impact of school size on the sense of school belonging. Therefore, we cite several studies that relate school size to variables associated with school belonging (indicators of school adjustment, etc.), and we cite less studies (and these are old studies) directly associating school size with school belonging.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I think the authors have done a good job.

From my point of view, the paper has improved compared to its previous version.

All the issues that I indicated in my previous report have been resolved satisfactorily.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your feedback.

Reviewer 3 Report

Although there is one reference from 2022 I thought in references in general must be reviewed (nowadays must be information about this topic)

Author Response

Dear reviewer, we have updated the literature to the most recent studies published on this topic that we are aware of. If you have any further suggestions on the subject, we are open to integrate them in the introduction and discussion sections of the paper.