Gender Differences in Resistance to Schooling: The Role of Dynamic Peer-Influence and Selection Processes

Abstract

Boys engage in notably higher levels of resistance to schooling than girls. While scholars argue that peer processes contribute to this gender gap, this claim has not been tested with longitudinal quantitative data. This study fills this lacuna by examining the role of dynamic peer-selection and influence processes in the gender gap in resistance to schooling (i.e., arguing with teachers, skipping class, not putting effort into school, receiving punishments at school, and coming late to class) with two-wave panel data. We expect that, compared to girls, boys are more exposed and more responsive to peers who exhibit resistant behavior. We estimate hybrid models on 5448 students from 251 school classes in Sweden (14–15 years, 49% boys), and stochastic actor-based models (SIENA) on a subsample of these data (2480 students in 98 classes; 49% boys). We find that boys are more exposed to resistant friends than girls, and that adolescents are influenced by the resistant behavior of friends. These peer processes do not contribute to a widening of the gender gap in resistance to schooling, yet they contribute somewhat to the persistence of the initial gender gap. Boys are not more responsive to the resistant behavior of friends than girls. Instead, girls are influenced more by the resistant behavior of lower status friends than boys. This explains to some extent why boys increase their resistance to schooling more over time. All in all, peer-influence and selection processes seem to play a minor role in gender differences in resistance to schooling. These findings nuance under investigated claims that have been made in the literature.

The impact of school tracking on school misconduct: variations by migration background in England, The Netherlands, and Sweden

“…Other systems, such as the Sweden and English one, apply courseby-course tracking. In England, this tracking is more extensive than in Sweden (Geven, Jonsson, and van Tubergen 2017).…”

“…I control for gender, as boys exhibit higher levels of school misconduct (Geven, Jonsson, and van Tubergen 2017), and may be assigned to lower tracks than girls (e.g. Timmermans, Boer, and Werf 2016).…”

“…Moreover, the latter may be true: to avoid severe punishments. students may at some point stop exhibiting more school misconduct (Geven, Jonsson, and van Tubergen 2017).…”

Social Exclusion and School Achievement: Children of Immigrants and Children of Natives in Three European Countries

“…Following Geven et al (2017), a measure for resistance to schooling is computed based on five survey items that capture the extent of the individual (1) arguing with teachers, (2) getting punishments at school, (3) skipping classes, (4) being late to classes, and (5) putting effort into work for school. These items load on one factor with individual loadings between 0.4 and 0.8 (Crohnbach's alpha = 0.71).…”

Emerging Scholar Best Article Award, 2018

“…In fact, all of the articles selected from each journal issue are notable for their focus on relationships and their influence on development. They did so by focusing on emotional wellbeing (Oshri et al 2017;Schäfer et al 2017;Coelho et al 2017;Bluth et al 2017), economic adversity (Nieuwenhuis et al 2017; Ng-Knight and Schoon 2017), peer interactions (Shin 2017), sexual partners (Rossi et al 2017), justice system involvement (Wolff et al 2017) and schooling (Amemiya and Wang 2017;Geven et al 2017).…”