Operationalization and Modeling of School Climate, Job Satisfaction, and Teacher Attrition: A Scoping Review

School climate, job satisfaction, and teacher attrition are frequently treated as three interrelated constructs, yet the extent to which the links among them are examined together remains unknown. This scoping review maps how studies that measure all three constructs operationalize them, at which levels and through which indicators. Screening 253 records retrieved from Web of Science, Scopus, and ERIC yielded 23 studies, which were coded using a 45-field extraction form. Coding was summarized through descriptive frequency distributions and analyzed inductively across operationalization, model architecture, and contextual fields. Four patterns emerged. First, which construct occupies the mediating position is contested; in one third of the studies the link between climate and satisfaction was never modeled, and in several the mediating position was occupied by work engagement or self-efficacy rather than by satisfaction. Second, no study measured job satisfaction and attrition at the same referent; the profession–school distinction was routinely drawn on the attrition side but almost never on the satisfaction side. Third, attrition was measured almost entirely through intention, with a single study documenting actual behavior. Fourth, although climate is most often defined as an organizational property, 20 of the 23 studies measured and analyzed it at the level of individual perception. The findings indicate not an absence of evidence but a lack of comparability among the evidence produced. Theoretical justification of the mediating construct and treatment of referent alignment as a design criterion are recommended.