Who belongs in school? Examining the link between Black and White racial disparities in sense of school belonging and suspension.

Relative to White students, Black students experience higher rates of exclusionary discipline and less welcoming school environments. However, little empirical research has examined the extent to which these two parallel racial disparities are linked. This study examines the relationship between student race and suspension and whether this relationship depends on school-level racial disparities in students' sense of school belonging. Using data from 73,755 students (56.4% White, 43.6% Black or African-American) nested within 131 schools, this study uses a series of multilevel models with cross-level interactions. This study finds that Black students are consistently more likely to be suspended than White students, but this difference is nonsignificant in schools where Black students' sense of school belonging is much higher than that of White students'. As such, schools' efforts toward reducing the discipline gap may benefit from making schools more welcoming to Black students.

Pick your Poison: Examining Adolescent Substance Use Through Opportunity Theory.

The present study examines substance use behaviors of middle and high school students, focusing on how varying influences of opportunity measures impact use of specific types of substances. The data used in the present study come from almost 4,000 students within 89 school contexts from students attending public school in a Southern state. HLM is used to explore the influence of various opportunities at both the student and school-level on the use of different types of substances. Results indicate measures of opportunity at both the student and school-level were significant; however, measures at the individual level were consistently more influential.

Culture as Values or Culture in Action? Street Codes and Student Violent Offending.

This study draws upon two competing cultural perspectives-culture-as-values and culture-in-action-in order to examine the relationship between street codes and the propensity to violently victimize others. Specifically, it explores whether individual-level and school-level street codes, net of one another, are related to three types of violence: assault, robbery and sexual battery. In addition, it considers whether these effects vary according to three contextual characteristics: 1) the location of the offending-in-school versus out-of-school; 2) school-level economic disadvantage; and 3) school efficacy. Three-level ordinal logistic regression models are estimated using four waves of survey data from over 3,000 students nested within 103 schools. Results provide evidence that individual-level street codes are related to violent offending in a manner that is, largely speaking, not tied to context. However, there is some evidence that the effects of school-level street codes on offending differ between outside of school and in school settings and are conditioned by levels of school disadvantage and efficacy. Overall, some support is offered for both the culture-as-values and culture-in-action perspectives.

Patterns of victimization between and within peer clusters in a high school social network.

This study presents a descriptive analysis of patterns of violent victimization between and within the various cohesive clusters of peers comprising a sample of more than 500 9th-12th grade students from one high school. Social network analysis techniques provide a visualization of the overall friendship network structure and allow for the examination of variation in victimization across the various peer clusters within the larger network. Social relationships among clusters with varying levels of victimization are also illustrated so as to provide a sense of possible spatial clustering or diffusion of victimization across proximal peer clusters. Additionally, to provide a sense of the sorts of peer clusters that support (or do not support) victimization, characteristics of clusters at both the high and low ends of the victimization scale are discussed. Finally, several of the peer clusters at both the high and low ends of the victimization continuum are "unpacked", allowing examination of within-network individual-level differences in victimization for these select clusters.