Individual and Contextual Effects of School Adjustment on Adolescent Alcohol Use

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of a student's own school adjustment as well as the contextual level of school adjustment (the normative level of school adjustment among students in a school) on student's self-reported use of alcohol. Using a dataset of 43,465 male and female 8 th grade students from 349 schools across the contiguous United States who participated in a national study of substance use in rural communities between 1996 and 2000, multilevel latent covariate models were utilized to disentangle the individual-level and contextual effects of three school adjustment variables (i.e., school bonding, behavior at school, and friend's school bonding) on alcohol use. All three school adjustment factors were significant predictors of alcohol use both within and between schools. Furthermore, this study demonstrated a strong contextual effect; students who attended schools where the overall level of school adjustment was higher reported lower levels of alcohol use even after taking their own school adjustment into account. The results demonstrate the importance of both a student's own level of school adjustment and the normative level of school adjustment among students in the school on an adolescent's use of alcohol. Differences in school adjustment across schools were quite strongly related to an adolescent's own alcohol use, indicating that school adjustment is an important aspect of school climate. Initiatives aimed at improving school climate may have beneficial effects on students' alcohol use.

A social contextual analysis of youth cigarette smoking development

“…The absence of school bond effects is notable given the theory's identification of the school as a microsystem. Our lack of findings contrasts with two other recent studies of school contextual effects on adolescent problem behaviors (Battistich & Hom, 1997;Henry et al, 2009), although neither of these studies focused specifically on cigarette smoking. Perhaps middle and high schools due to their larger size compared with elementary schools are less apt to function as a primary socialization context.…”

“…Such relationships can be understood from a social control perspective as evidence for the constraining influence of conventional parent-child bonds. Similarly, inverse relationships between youth substance use and school connectedness (Battistich & Hom, 1997;Henry, Stanley, Edwards, Harkabus, & Chapin, 2009) provide evidence for the protective effect of conventional school bonds. Although focused on violence and delinquency rather than on smoking, neighborhood features such as social cohesion and informal social control have been conceptualized within the context of social control theory as deterrents to youth misbehavior (e.g., Brook, Nomura, & Cohen, 1989;Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997).…”

School Bonding As a Moderator of the Effect of Peer Influences on Alcohol Use Among American Indian Adolescents

“…For children and adolescents, the school environment has been described as a particularly important socialization environment (Catalano et al, 2004). Ample research with the general population shows a moderate to strong negative relationship between school bonding (and other related school engagement factors) and alcohol use (Catalano et al, 2004;Guo et al, 2001;Henry et al, 2007Henry et al, , 2009Resnick et al, 1997). To date, few studies have explored school bonding as a moderator of the effect of peer use on alcohol use among adolescents, but we posit that school bonding may buffer this effect.…”

Academics and Substance Use among Latino Adolescents: Results from a National Study

“…School connectedness has been identified as an important protective factor against adolescent substance use (Bryant, Schulenberg, O'Malley, Bachman, & Johnston, 2003;Dornbusch, Erickson, Laird, & Wong, 2001;Henry & Slater, 2007;Henry, Stanley, Edwards, Harkabus, & Chapin, 2009;Simons-Morton, Crump, Haynie, & Saylor, 1999;Wang, Matthew, Bellamy, & James, 2005). There has been variation in the literature on the definition of school connectedness (Libbey, 2004).…”