Measuring school engagement for child welfare involved youth: Assessing the dimensionality of the Drug Free School Scale.

Background: Research using data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) have consistently used the scale developed from the Drug Free Schools and Communities Act (DFSCA) to examine school engagement. Although the DFSCA is widely used, no study has examined the factor structure to determine if the scale is best used as a summative score of all items or as a three-factor variable distinguishing behavioral, emotional, and cognitive school engagement.

Objective: The primary goal of this study was to evaluate the hypothesized factor structure of the DFSCA scale by testing models previously supported in the literature.