Identification of Social Groups Based on Social Integration in a Multi-Racial High School.

This paper took as its problem the belief among the general public that conflict and violence among students is a common occurrence, especially in schools that are racially mixed. The responses of 303 students from a racially mixed school. Berkeley High School, were grouped in terms of the degree to which the individual students are socially integrated and the students were examined in light of the violence they had personally experienced. It was hypothesized that students who were socially integrated across ethnic boundaries were not involved with perceived violence and conflict on the campus, while aggressive acts, in the main, involved students whose friends and companions were of their own race. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire sent to about a third of the 1970 graduating class of Berkeley High School. The Tryon clustering of objects was used to identify independent groups of students who were socially isolated or integrated across races. That procedure was effective in that it generated six clearly identifiable groups of students who were socially isolated or socially integrated across the Asian, black, and white students in the school. Because of the low frequencies, the hypothesis that conflict and violence centers around students who are not socially integrated is not supported. (Author/JM)