Tag Archives | Schools

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This article examines whether network instability—namely, the extent of turnover in a person’s social network over time—is a distinct social process that affects individual well-being. Using a unique two-wave network data set collected in a field experiment that involved more than 21,100 students across 56 middle schools, we find a strong negative association between network instability and well-being and academic effort at the individual level, independent of other types of network change effects. We assess whether the negative effect of network instability remains when the source of instability is exogenous, the result of participation in the randomized intervention. Network instability leads to negative consequences even in this context, negatively impacting students who directly participated in the intervention. For nonintervention students in treatment schools, the intervention stabilized their social networks. We discuss the implications of these findings for studies of social networks and collective action.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Hana Shepherd: Department of Sociology, Rutgers University
E-mail: hshepherd@sociology.rutgers.edu

Adam Reich: Department of Sociology, Columbia University
E-mail: ar3237@columbia.edu

Acknowledgments: We thank the members of the Columbia University Networks and Time Workshop for their feedback on this project. Amy Kate Bailey, Lauren Krivo, Emily Marshall, Christine Percheski, and LaTonya Trotter provided helpful feedback on early versions of the manuscript. The data set used in this article (available at Inter-University Consortium for Politics and Social Research, https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37070.v1) was collected by Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Hana Shepherd and was funded by grants from the W. T. Grant Foundation Scholars Program, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Princeton Educational Research Section, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rutgers Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.

Citation: Shepherd, Hana, and Adam Reich. 2020. “The Toll of Turnover: Network Instability, Well-Being, and Academic Effort in 56 Middle Schools.” Sociological Science 7: 663-691.
Received: August 12, 2020
Accepted: September 30, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a28

Effects of Public School Closures on Crime: The Case of the 2013 Chicago Mass School Closure

By Parker Webservices on April 28, 2020 in Articles

Noli Brazil

Sociological Science April 28, 2020
10.15195/v7.a6

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Public school closures are increasing in number and size in U.S. cities. In response, parents, teachers, and public school advocates argue that closures carry negative consequences for multiple institutions across a wide set of outcomes. One such institution is the local neighborhood, and a negative consequence that is frequently raised is increased crime. I test this claim by using the 2013 Chicago mass school closure as a case study. Rather than conceiving of a school closure as a binary event (closed or not closed) I break it out according to a school’s status after closure: vacant, repurposed, and merged with an existing school. I find that vacancy and repurposing into a nonschool are associated with decreased crime. In contrast, merging a closed school with an existing school is associated with increased crime. The vacancy and repurposing effects are spatiotemporally localized, concentrated in the 75-meter area surrounding the school and disappearing after a year, whereas the student merger effect persisted over time across larger spatial scales. My results suggest that the relationship between closure and neighborhood crime is not straightforward, varying by postclosure land use status and spatiotemporal factors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Noli Brazil: Department of Human Ecology, University of California, Davis
E-mail: nbrazil@ucdavis.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank Luis Guarnizo, Andrew Papachristos, and Jenna Stearns for generously reading previous versions and providing invaluable feedback. I also thank Enrica Jiang for data collection and research assistance. Any remaining errors are mine alone.

Citation: Brazil, Noli. 2020. “Effects of Public School Closures on Crime: The Case of the 2013 Chicago Mass School Closure.” Sociological Science 7: 128-151.
Received: January 9, 2020
Accepted: February 22, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a6

Socioeconomic, Ethnic, Racial, and Gender Gaps in Children’s Social/Behavioral Skills: Do They Grow Faster in School or out?

By Parker Webservices on May 29, 2019 in Articles

Douglas B. Downey, Joseph Workman, Paul von Hippel

Sociological Science, May 29, 2019
10.15195/v6.a17

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Children’s social and behavioral skills vary considerably by socioeconomic status (SES), race and/or ethnicity, and gender, yet it is unclear to what degree these differences are due to school or nonschool factors. We observe how gaps in social and behavioral skills change during school and nonschool (summer) periods from the start of kindergarten entry until the end of second grade in a recent and nationally representative sample of more than 16,000 children (the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 2010–11). We find that large gaps in social and behavioral skills exist at the start of kindergarten entry, and these gaps favor high-SES, white, and female children. Over the next three years, we observed that the gaps grow no faster when school is in than when school is out. In the case of social and behavioral skills, it appears that schools neither exacerbate inequality nor reduce it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Douglas B. Downey: Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University
E-mail: downey32@gmail.com

Joseph Workman: Department of Sociology, University of Missouri-Kansas City
E-mail: workmanj@umkc.edu

Paul von Hippel: Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin
E-mail: paulvonhippel.utaustin@gmail.com

Acknowledgements: Direct all correspondence to Douglas B. Downey (downey32@gmail.com), 1885 Neil Ave., Columbus, Ohio 43022.

Citation: Downey, Douglas B., Joseph Workman, and Paul von Hippel. 2019. “Socioeconomic, Ethnic, Racial, and Gender Gaps in Children’s Social/Behavioral Skills: Do They Grow Faster in School or out?” Sociological Science 6: 446-466.
Received: March 17, 2019
Accepted: March 30, 2019
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
DOI: 10.15195/v6.a17

Schools as Moderators of Genetic Associations with Life Course Attainments: Evidence from the WLS and Add Health

By Parker Webservices on August 2, 2018 in Articles

Sam Trejo, Daniel W Belsky, Jason D. Boardman, Jeremy Freese, Kathleen Mullan Harris, Pam Herd, Kamil Sicinski, Benjamin W. Domingue

Sociological Science, August 2, 2018
10.15195/v5.a22

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Genetic variants identified in genome-wide association studies of educational attainment have been linked with a range of positive life course development outcomes. However, it remains unclear whether school environments may moderate these genetic associations. We analyze data from two biosocial surveys that contain both genetic data and follow students from secondary school through mid- to late life. We test if the magnitudes of the associations with educational and occupational attainments varied across the secondary schools that participants attended or with characteristics of those schools. Although we find little evidence that genetic associations with educational and occupational attainment varied across schools or with school characteristics, genetic associations with any postsecondary education and college completion were moderated by school-level socioeconomic status. Along similar lines, we observe substantial between-school variation in the average level of educational attainment students achieved for a fixed genotype. These findings emphasize the importance of social context in the interpretation of genetic associations. Specifically, our results suggest that though existing measures of individual genetic endowment have a linear relationship with years of schooling that is relatively consistent across school environments, school context is crucial in connecting an individual’s genotype to his or her likelihood of crossing meaningful educational thresholds.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Sam Trejo: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
E-mail: samtrejo@stanford.edu.

Daniel W. Belsky: Duke University School of Medicine and Social Science Research Institute
E-mail: dbelsky@duke.edu

Jason D. Boardman: Institute of Behavioral Science and Sociology Department, University of Colorado Boulder
E-mail: boardman@colorado.edu

Jeremy Freese: Department of Sociology, Stanford University
E-mail: jfreese@stanford.edu

Kathleen Mullan Harris: Department of Sociology and Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
E-mail: kathie_harris@unc.edu

Pam Herd: Department of Sociology and La Folette School of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin–Madison
E-mail: pherd@lafollette.wisc.edu

Kamil Sicinski: Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
E-mail: ksicinsk@ssc.wisc.edu

Benjamin W. Domingue: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
E-mail: bdomingue@stanford.edu

Acknowledgements: This work has been supported (in part) by award 96-17-04 from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant DGE-1656518 (Trejo), the Institute of Education Sciences under grant R305B140009 (Trejo), and a Jacobs Foundation Early Career Research Fellowship (Belsky). This research uses Add Health GWAS data funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant R01 HD073342 to Kathleen Mullan Harris and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and National Institutes of Health grant R01 HD060726 to Harris, Boardman, and McQueen. Add Health is a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; it is funded by grant P01 HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study is directed by Pamela Herd, and the work conducted herein was supported by the National Institute on Aging (R01 AG041868-01A1 and P30 AG017266). This research benefitted from GWAS results made available by the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium. Any opinions expressed are those of the author(s) alone and should not be construed as representing the opinions of each foundation.