Context matters

This dissertation consists of two free-standing articles that examine the relationship between the school climate and students' behavior. Together they emphasize the importance of considering contextual factors on individual development, and the influence of schools on the way students interpret and negotiate social relationships. The first article reports on findings about the relationship between school climate and social development. In this paper, I found that students engaged in fewer incidences of school risk behavior when they perceived school as a more positive place. This relationship was moderated by students' level of social awareness, or their capacity to understand and interpret social issues, from interpersonal to intergroup relationships. For students who viewed the school climate as less positive, those students who demonstrated higher levels of social awareness engaged in more disruptive behavior than their peers. However, in schools where the climate was more positively perceived overall, these students engaged in fewer incidences of school risk behavior. In other words, while school climate affects all students, it has a stronger effect on those students who have a more sophisticated understanding of social relationships. A positive school climate helps them, but a negative school climate exacerbates their problems even more. In the second article, I report three findings about the effects of perception of school climate, school context, and culture on students' behavior in school. First, I found a negative relationship between students' perceptions of school climate and their reported school risk behavior. In other words, students who rated their overall school climate more positively also tended to engage in fewer risk behaviors in school. Second, the broader school context also plays a role in the way students perceive their school climate, such that the effect of a positive school climate was stronger for students in district schools as opposed to students in charter schools. Lastly, students' ethnicity also seemed to be a factor in the way they perceived climate as well as their behavior in school. The effect of a positive school climate on behavior was most pronounced for Latino and Black students in district schools.