Citation

Wong MD, Chung PJ, Hays RD, Kennedy DP, Tucker JS, Dudovitz RN. J. Child Fam. Stud. 2019; 28(4): 928-940.

Affiliation

David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, 10833 Le Conte Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1736.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s10826-018-01325-0

PMID

31745385

PMCID

PMC6863439

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: Schools are thought to have an important impact on adolescent behaviors, but the mechanisms are not well understood. We hypothesize that there are measurable constructs of peer- and teacher-related extrinsic motivations for adolescent behaviors and sought to develop measures of school culture that would capture these constructs.

METHODS: We developed several survey items to assess school behavioral culture and collected self-reported data from a sample of adolescents age 14-17 attending high school in low income neighborhoods of Los Angeles. We conducted exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to inform the creation of simple-summated multi-item scales. We also conducted a cultural consensus analysis to identify the existence of shared pattern of responses to the items among respondents within the same school.

RESULTS: From 1159 adolescents, six factors were identified: social culture regarding popular (Cronbach's alpha=0.84) and respected (alpha=0.83) behaviors, teacher support (alpha=0.86) and monitoring of school rules (alpha=0.85), valued student traits (alpha=0.67) and school order (alpha=0.68). Cultural consensus analysis identified a shared pattern of responses to the items among respondents at 8 of the 13 schools. School academic performance, which is based on standardized test results, is strongly correlated with social culture regarding popular behaviors (Pearson's correlation coefficient r=0.64), monitoring of school rules (r= 0.71), and school order (r= 0.83).

CONCLUSIONS: The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses did not support a single, overall factor that measures school culture. However, the six identified sub-scales might be used individually to examine school influence on academic performance and health behaviors.

Language: en

Keywords

School culture; academic performance; behavioral economics; risky behaviors; social networks