The Social Economics of Adolescent Behavior and Measuring the Behavioral Culture of Schools.

Objectives: Schools are thought to have an important impact on adolescent behaviors, but the mechanisms are not well understood. We hypothesize that there are measurable constructs of peer- and teacher-related extrinsic motivations for adolescent behaviors and sought to develop measures of school culture that would capture these constructs.Methods: We developed several survey items to assess school behavioral culture and collected self-reported data from a sample of adolescents age 14-17 attending high school in low income neighborhoods of Los Angeles. We conducted exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to inform the creation of simple-summated multi-item scales. We also conducted a cultural consensus analysis to identify the existence of shared pattern of responses to the items among respondents within the same school.Results: From 1159 adolescents, six factors were identified: social culture regarding popular (Cronbach's alpha = 0.84) and respected (alpha = 0.83) behaviors, teacher support (alpha = 0.86) and monitoring of school rules (alpha = 0.85), valued student traits (alpha = 0.67) and school order (alpha = 0.68). Cultural consensus analysis identified a shared pattern of responses to the items among respondents at 8 of the 13 schools. School academic performance, which is based on standardized test results, is strongly correlated with social culture regarding popular behaviors (Pearson's correlation coefficient r = 0.64), monitoring of school rules (r = 0.71), and school order (r = 0.83).Conclusions: The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses did not support a single, overall factor that measures school culture. However, the six identified sub-scales might be used individually to examine school influence on academic performance and health behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]