Resilience against radicalization and extremism in schools: Development of a psychometric scale

The paper, in plain language

Measuring what practitioners believe

Policymakers routinely cast schools as the front line of radicalization prevention, but the claim had little direct measurement behind it. With a team of student co-authors, Carina Haugestad and the organization Youth Against Violence, I developed a psychometric scale of school resilience — grounded in pupil–teacher relationships and social cohesion — and validated it with Norwegian upper-secondary pupils against risk factors like anomie, threat perceptions, relative deprivation, and radical and violent intentions.

Equality carries the weight

Three dimensions emerged: school attentiveness, equal treatment, and mutual respect. Equal treatment was the protective one, predicting lower anomie, lower threat perceptions, lower deprivation, and lower radical and violent intentions. Attentiveness pointed the other way — pupils reporting more attentive schools also reported more threat and stronger violent intentions — which we read not as attentiveness causing harm but as schools attending most where problems already exist. Mutual respect predicted nothing reliably.

Why it matters

In an egalitarian country like Norway, fairness may be the school's most credible promise — and its breach the sharpest grievance; that reading fits the relative-deprivation account of extremism my other work develops. The scale is a first version with honest limits: a cross-sectional design, one region, skewed intention measures, and a third of respondents lost to attention checks. But it gives prevention research something it lacked — an instrument for the environment where every adolescent can be reached.