The Social Marginalization of Adolescents in High School

描述(由申请者提供)：这个项目提出了一种详细的、有理论基础的方法来解决青春期的一个共同但重要的特征：不同的年轻人在社会上被边缘化。正如过去十年中许多备受瞩目的案例所反映的那样，在外貌、背景或行为方面与学校格格不入的青少年可能会受到同龄人和同学的排斥、羞辱或骚扰，这种边缘化的后果可能会对青少年本身、他们的学校和这些动态发挥作用的社区造成严重后果。为了更好地理解这一复杂现象的短期和长期后果背后的机制，本项目将根据镜子自我的理论模型进行三个步骤的分析：1)确定在学校面临社会边缘化风险的青少年，因为他们的经济、学业和健康特征与学校社会背景下这些特征的平均发生率不一致，如学校内同伴网络和整个学生身体所捕捉到的；2)调查边缘化风险与青少年抑郁之间的关联；以及3)研究青春期边缘化风险产生的抑郁是否转化为青春期的问题应对行为。这些步骤将通过对来自国家青少年健康纵向研究(Add Health)的8272名年轻人样本应用多层次建模技术来实施。这一数据集包含用于衡量青少年经济、学业和健康特征的自我和家长报告数据；基于青少年及其朋友报告的网络数据，可用于确定和衡量校内同龄人群体的特征；在一个数据点对学习学校进行的接近普查，可用于创建每个学校学生人数的汇总统计数据；以及一个纵向框架，允许在关键概念之间进行时间排序，将选择过程建模为边缘化的风险，以及青春期和过渡到青春期的联系。这一经典的社会心理学观点和具有全国代表性的青少年数据相结合，使该项目能够更好地了解年轻人在学校易受社会边缘化的情况如何以及为什么会对其自身发展造成破坏，并转化为更严重的社会问题。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project proposes a detailed, theoretically grounded approach to a common, yet significant, feature of adolescence: the social marginalization of young people who are different. As reflected in many high profile cases in the last decade, adolescents who do not "fit in" at school--in terms of their looks, background, or behavior---can be ostracized, stigmatized, or harassed by their peers and fellow students, and the consequences of this marginalization can be severe for the adolescents themselves, their schools, and the communities in which these dynamics play out. To better understand the mechanisms underlying the short- and long-term consequences of this complex phenomenon, this project will undertake a three-step analysis derived from the theoretical model of the Looking Glass Self: 1) identifying adolescents at risk of social marginalization at school because their economic, academic, and health characteristics are discordant with the average occurrence of these characteristics in the social contexts of their schools, as captured by in-school peer network and the student body as a whole; 2) investigating the association between risk of marginalization and adolescent depression; and 3) examining whether the depression arising from risk of marginalization in adolescence translates into problematic coping behaviors in young adulthood. These steps will be undertaken by applying multi-level modeling techniques to a sample of 8,272 young people from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). This dataset contains self- and parent-reported data for the measurement of the economic, academic, and health characteristics of adolescents; network data based on the reports of adolescents and their friends that allows the identification and measurement of the characteristics of in-school peer groups; a near-Census of study schools at one data point that can be tapped to create summary statistics for the student body of each school; and a longitudinal framework that allows for temporal ordering among key concepts, the modeling of selection processes into risk of marginalization, and the linkage of adolescence and the transition to young adulthood. This combination of a classic social psychological perspective and nationally representative data on adolescents positions this project to better understand how and why the vulnerability of young people to social marginalization at school can be disruptive to their own development and also translate into greater social problems.