Race and School Contexts of Adolescent Social Relations

描述(申请人提供)：非洲裔美国人结婚较晚，而且比非西班牙裔白人更有可能永远不结婚，因此有超过三分之二的黑人儿童是未婚母亲所生。之前的研究表明，经济因素，特别是黑人男性的高失业率和低收入，可以解释这种种族差距的部分原因，但不是全部。其余的可能是由于我们尚未确定的社会因素。与成年相比，青春期对人际关系形成的社会影响可能更容易衡量，因为青少年的生活更严格地受到家庭和学校的控制，而不是平行机构控制成年人的生活。我们预计，导致成人关系形成的种族和民族差异的社会因素在青春期是明显的，但除了研究性行为外，很少有研究考察青少年与异性的社会关系。为了证明研究青少年社会经验的价值，我们将研究青少年与异性的关系特征与成年后的关系形成之间的联系。 我们的主要目标是利用国家青少年健康纵向调查(Add Health)和高中成绩单研究青少年健康与学业成就(AHAA)的数据，调查学校的机构和社会背景如何塑造青少年与异性的关系。我们区分了青春期关系的两个维度，性行为和夫妻参与。夫妻参与关系到夫妻在多大程度上以夫妻的身份向对方和其他人展示自己。之前的大多数研究都集中在性行为上，但白人和黑人关系之间的一个关键区别可能是在夫妇维度上，以及青春期性关系伴随着夫妇认同的程度。我们将对学校的社会环境和青少年与异性关系的这两个维度之间的关联进行建模。学校的内部结构塑造了性关系和浪漫关系的规范氛围。我们通过观察其他学生的态度和行为来描述规范的氛围。重要的是，我们不是假设所有的学生都有相同的社会背景，而是通过检查选课行为来确定子群体，并创建表征这些子群体中学生的态度和行为的措施。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): African Americans marry later and are more likely never to marry than Non-Hispanic whites, and consequently high proportions-over two-thirds-of black children are born to unmarried mothers. Prior research shows that economic factors, specifically high rates of unemployment and low earnings among black men, explain some, but not all, of this race gap. The remainder is probably due to social factors we have yet to identify. The social influences on relationship formation are likely easier to measure in adolescence than in adulthood, because adolescents' lives are more tightly controlled by the family and school than parallel institutions control adult lives. We expect that the social factors that contribute to race and ethnic differences in adult relationship formation are evident in adolescence, but few studies have examined adolescent social relationships with the opposite sex except to study sexual behavior. To demonstrate the value of investigating adolescent social experiences, we will examine the associations between the characteristics of adolescents' relationships with the opposite sex and relationship formation in adulthood. Our primary goal is to investigate how adolescent relationships with the opposite sex are shaped by the institutional and social context of schools, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and the high school transcript study, Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement (AHAA). We distinguish two dimensions of adolescent relationships, sexual activity and couple involvement. Couple involvement concerns the degree to which the pair presents themselves to each other and to others as a couple. Most prior research has focused on sexual activity, but a key difference between white and black relationships may be along the couple dimension and the degree to which adolescent sexual relationships are accompanied by couple identification. We will model the association between the social context of schools and these two dimensions of adolescent relationships with the opposite sex. The internal structure of schools shapes the normative climate for sexual and romantic relationships. We characterize the normative climate by observing the attitudes and behaviors of other students. Importantly, rather than assuming that all students share the same social context, we identify subgroups by examining course-taking behaviors and create measures that characterize the attitudes and behaviors of students within these subgroups.