Abstract
The student-teacher relationship has been shown to be a crucial aspect of children’s development, and one that aids in children’s social and emotional development and affects children’s academic achievement. The Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS), and its three subscales: closeness, conflict and dependency, is the most commonly used scale to measure relationship quality, and one that is administered to children of all ages. Literature shows that the student-teacher relationship quality is relevant in younger children, but it is also important to assess the stability of the relationship across time, notably across the transition phase from primary to secondary school, which naturally follows changes in children. The literature on the original scale suggests varying levels of structural validity of the STRS, and the revised short version equally requires validation. Using the STRS short form, the study aimed to (a) assess the factor structure of the STRS short form version in a Finnish sample using the Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM) framework and (b) to investigate the stability of closeness and conflict and their cross-lagged effects across the transition from primary school to secondary school. Using the ESEM approach and a bifactor ESEM, the results indicated that the STRS short form is a valid measure of the student-teacher relationship, and that a general factor is perhaps necessary to fully understand the measure. The results also showed stability of closeness and conflict over time. These results will be further discussed in the context of the wider literature in more detail.