School-Level Influences on Individual Patterns of Behavior: Taking Advantage of a Multi-Cohort, Multi-Site Intervention Study

Introduction: Peer victimization is common among adolescents with prevalence rates between 21-54% (Wang et al. 2009). Adolescents involved in peer victimization represent a diverse group who differ in their role (e.g., aggressor, aggressive-victim) and adjustment (Schwartz et al., 2001). Whereas prior research has primarily focused on individual-level risk factors for peer victimization, it is becoming increasingly common for studies to focus on school contextual influences on aggression and peer victimization (e.g., Henry et al., 2011). Multilevel modeling provides a particularly appropriate approach for examining the influence of the school context on student behaviors. Unfortunately, few previous studies have sampled a sufficiently large and diverse sample of schools to provide a basis for examining school-level factors. Method: Data from the Multisite Violence Prevention Project (MVPP) on two cohorts of students (N=5,106) enrolled in 37 schools in four communities (MVPP, 2004) are used. Data were collected as part of a randomized trial where schools were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: a universal intervention, a selective intervention, a combined intervention, or no intervention. The present study uses data from fall of 6^th grade prior to the intervention for each cohort. Students completed measures of aggression, victimization and school climate including norms supporting aggression and nonviolence, student-teacher relationships, and awareness and reporting of peer victimization; their teachers completed measures of student-teacher relationships, staff relationships, and awareness and reporting of peer victimization. We use multilevel latent class analysis to identify classes of aggression and peer victimization (level 1) and examine the influence of school climate (level 2) on classes. Class enumeration is conducted separately by cohort to validate class structure. Since school climate measures are cohort-specific, we then examine cohort effects at level 2. Finally, we construct latent indicators of school climate at level 2 based on student-level and teacher-level data and examine influence on level 1 classes. Results: The same four classes were identified in each cohort: non-victimized aggressors (Cohort 1: 23%; Cohort 2: 24%), aggressive-victims (Cohort 1: 39%; Cohort 2: 37%), predominantly victimized (Cohort 1: 21%; Cohort 2: 18%), and well-adjusted (Cohort 1: 16%; Cohort 2: 21%). Additional analyses are being conducted to examine the influence of school climate at level 2 on level 1 classes and determine whether these associations are the same across cohort and site. Conclusion: Associations between student behavior and the school environment and variations in such associations will be discussed. Implications for intervening at different levels of the school ecology will also be described.