Student Relationships Assessment (SRA)

 Vision and Purpose

The SRA is designed to give students at Christian colleges and universities across the country the opportunity to focus and reflect on some important areas of their emotional, relational and spiritual lives. It will also help administration, faculty and student development staff at participating schools discover ways in which they can more effectively educate and equip the “whole” student. Specifically, the SRA assesses personal and relational growth and spiritual formation and is designed to be sensitive to changes (hopefully growth) in these areas. The SRA also provides an ongoing and comparative assessment of spiritual, emotional, and relational competencies, and interest in growth opportunities that are reflective of the integration of faith and learning in the lives of students.

Development info

Development of the SRA was started in 2001 by the CRE team and a group of professional consultants. The initial development involved a comprehensive literature review and thorough survey of existing instruments to determine if any of them fit the criteria of our center to assess relational, emotional and spiritual development in college students. Our team concluded that there was not an existing instrument that adequately met our criteria.

Based upon this initial research and with the help of outside consultants, the CRE team began to generate items based on our desire for an instrument that would assess spiritual, emotional, and relational competence and growth. After generating thousands of items, the first generation SRA was completed and given to several schools for Beta testing. Over seven hundred college students from Biola, Regent, Huntington , Abilene Christian, North Greenville College , and JBU assisted in the initial development of the SRA. Currently, over 4,000 college students have taken the SRA, and it is in its fourth major revision.

Our plan involves having students take the SRA at the beginning of their freshman year and at the end of their freshman, sophomore, junior and senior years. The results from the SRA will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the URI and university curriculum in equipping current students to establish and maintain healthy relationships with God and with others.

Our long-term plan is to develop a form available for students to take online after they graduate. This will provide us with a potentially invaluable longitudinal perspective. As we are able to assess the long-term impact of our programs, we will be able to improve what we are doing as well us find new ways to more effectively encourage and serve our alumni.

SRA Reliability and Validity

For the SRA to be of any value it must have reliability and validity. Reliability indicates whether the attribute measured by the test—whatever it is—is being assessed in a consistent, precise way. Whether the test is actually assessing what it was designed to measure is addressed by an analysis of the test's validity. The SRA has good reliability (.800+ alpha) in that it provides dependable and consistent results.

On the other hand, validity refers to a test's accuracy—it measures what it is intended to measure. Evidence for validity comes from showing the association between a test and other variables over time. At this point, the SRA has good Face Validity (whether or not a test “looks like” it measures what it is intended to measure) and Content Validity (experts agree that test items are an adequate and representative sample of the target domain). We are currently testing the SRA for Construct Validity and Predictive Validity and should have results in the spring of 2007.