A mixed qualitative and quantitative research method, applied in two phases, was used to address the research aim. Phase 1 - Participants, material gathering and analysis procedure The first phase was aimed at gathering and analyzing FI as described by students, in order to learn about actual instantiations of this theoretical concept. Phase 1 included 100 undergraduate students who were asked to describe an incivility incident they were involved in or witnessed in college. Four meaningful categories have emerged from the qualitative analysis: 1. Passive FI towards a group of students, for example, ignoring students' questions during lectures. 2. Passive FI towards an individual refers to teachers being unavailable to the student or inattentive to his/her problems. 3. Active FI towards a group of students, for example, the teacher expresses anger in response to students who express difficulties in following or understanding a lecture. 4. Active FI towards an individual refers to activities, such as offensive comments used by the teacher towards a student. The students' descriptions were formulated as short items, for example, The teacher, mocks you as a response to your misunderstanding of the learning material (refers to active FI towards an individual), or "The teacher ignores students' applications during lectures" (pertains to passive FI towards a group of students). Each item was given a Likert-type score ranging from 1 = almost never to 5 = nearly always. Phase 2: Participants and analysis procedure Phase 2 was used to assess construct validity and internal consistency of the developed questionnaire (hereinafter: The Perceived Faculty Incivility Scale [PFIS]). A principal component analysis followed by a Varimax rotation was used to corroborate the stability of the PFIS structure, as found in Phase 1 (eigenvalue > 1.00; item loadings > .30). Participants Data for the analysis were gathered from 744 undergraduate students (17.7% males and 82.3% females) from two major colleges located in the Northern Galilee: 40.4% from college A, and 59.6% from college B, of whom 39.6% were Jewish students, 12.1% Christian students, 37.6% Muslim students, and 10.7% Druze students, with a mean age of 24.4 (SD=4.9) years. A principal component analysis yielded only two categories: Passive incivility and active incivility. Six items were excluded from the scale. Taken together, Factor I contained 13 items and appeared to represent active incivility (Cronbach’s alpha equals to .90). Factor II contained 8 items pertaining to passive incivility (Cronbach’s alpha equals to .73).

A mix method approach was applied to construct and validate a new scale for measuring FI. The qualitative results foregrounded four categories: (1) Passive FI towards a group of students, (2) passive FI towards an individual (3) active FI towards a group of students, and (4) active FI towards an individual. This qualitative analysis was followed by factor analysis, which revealed only two dimensions of passive and active FI. This result is consistent with the previous theoretical classification of passive vs. active incivility (Knepp, 2012), and elaborates the body of research by empirically testing the existence of these theoretical dimensions regarding FI. Nonetheless, the analysis has failed corroborating the four-dimension solution of the qualitative research result. A plausible explanation could be related to power differences between students and lecturers, especially in an uncivil climate. As in such climate the power distance between lecturers and students is salient, therefore, it is possible that students could develop a horizontal solidarity with their classmates. Fajak and Aslam (1998) support this claim by stating that whenever the power distance among different status holders is prominent, solidarity among the powerless individuals is more likely to be generated and a sense of identification between the powerless individuals could emerge. Thus, it may be inferred that a student who is exposed to an uncivil behavior could tend perceiving it as a threat to his/her social identity, even when the uncivil behavior was not specifically directed towards him/her. That could mean that class members might conceive personal and collective uncivil behaviors in a close manner. Under such circumstances, it is plausible to assume that incivilities towards the individual and incivilities towards the collective could pertain to a single underlying measurement construct (dimension) that accounts for variation in this study's examinee response.