This document examines public-school teacher satisfaction with procedural justice and distributive justice, regarding school responses to theft, sexual harassment, and physical assault victimization events; it lays out details regarding the research methodology, data analysis, results, and a discussion of the study’s implications for policy and future research.
This report addresses a gap in the literature regarding the understanding of the quality of teachers’ treatment when victimizations are reported to school administrators; the research study being presented here attempts to fill that gap by applying procedural justice theory to understand how elements of school responses to victimization events impacts teacher satisfaction with the process. The authors used data from teachers in the 50 largest school districts in the United States to identify 636 theft, sexual harassment, and physical assault incidents that were reported to school administration. Teachers’ satisfaction with the school response was modeled with measures derived from distributive and procedural justice theoretical frameworks that were applied to administrator actions. Research results indicated that procedural justice is an important aspect of school response and influences teachers’ reported satisfaction with how victimization events were handled.