The Ethnic Composition of Schools and Students' Problem Behaviour in Four European Countries the Role of Friends Geven, S.; Kalmijn, M.; Van Tubergen, F
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UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) The ethnic composition of schools and students' problem behaviour in four European countries The role of friends Geven, S.; Kalmijn, M.; van Tubergen, F. DOI 10.1080/1369183X.2015.1121806 Publication date 2016 Document Version Final published version Published in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies License CC BY Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Geven, S., Kalmijn, M., & van Tubergen, F. (2016). The ethnic composition of schools and students' problem behaviour in four European countries: The role of friends. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42(9), 1473-1495. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1121806 General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). 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UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:24 Sep 2021 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES, 2016 VOL. 42, NO. 9, 1473–1495 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1121806 The ethnic composition of schools and students’ problem behaviour in four European countries: the role of friends Sara Gevena, Matthijs Kalmijnb and Frank van Tubergena,c aSociology Department, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands; bSociology Department, The University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; cSociology Department, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This study examines the relation between the proportion of Received 27 January 2015 co-ethnics in school and adolescents’ problem behaviour in school Accepted 13 November 2015 (e.g. skipping class and arguing with teachers) and whether KEYWORDS friendship patterns are underlying this relationship. We use data Ethnic composition; ethnic from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four congruence; student European Countries on ±16,000 students in England, Germany, behaviour; friendships; The Netherlands, and Sweden and find that children display less adolescence problem behaviour when the proportion of co-ethnics in school is higher. This relationship is mediated by the characteristics of the friends that students have: the proportion of co-ethnics in school positively relates to students’ proportion of in-school friends and co-ethnic friends in class, which are in turn negatively associated with problem behaviour in school. The strength and significance of these paths depend on students’ ethnicity and country of residence. Implications of this study are discussed in the conclusion. Introduction The effect of a school’s ethnic composition on students’ school outcomes has received con- siderable attention in the scientific as well as the political debate. Most of these studies have focused on the effect of the ethnic composition of schools on school performance, such as standardised test scores (Bankston and Caldas 1996; Driessen 2002) and grades (Szulkin and Jonsson 2007). This line of research has shown that especially for ethnic min- ority students, the proportion of ethnic minorities in school tends to have a detrimental effect on cognitive school outcomes (Hallinan 1998; Thijs and Verkuyten 2014) and thereby calls for the ethnic integration of schools. Much less research has examined the effect of the ethnic composition of schools on non- cognitive school outcomes and existing studies on this relationship seem to provide a different picture. Recent US-based studies indicate that students who are surrounded by more co-ethnics in school exhibit less problem behaviour in school (Eitle and Eitle 2004; Benner and Crosnoe 2011; Georgiades, Boyle, and Fife 2013) (with the exception of the study by Johnson, Crosnoe, CONTACT Sara Geven [email protected] Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here. doi:10.1080/1369183X.2015.1121806 © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1474 S. GEVEN ET AL. and Elder (2001)). This association has been found for ethnic minority students as well as for ethnic majority students (Benner and Crosnoe 2011; Georgiades, Boyle, and Fife 2013). Although various US-based studies show support for the relation between the proportion of co-ethnics – also referred to as ethnic density (Fleischmann et al. 2012) or ethnic congru- ence (Benner and Graham 2007; Georgiades, Boyle, and Fife 2013) – and problem behaviour in school, Western-European research on this relationship is scarce. After the Second World War, ethnic diversity has risen steadily in Western-Europe (Castles and Miller 2009). Hence, ethnic majority students are increasingly surrounded by minority students, while ethnic minority students are increasingly surrounded by co-ethnics in school. In order to better understand how students are affected by this, the first research question is: ‘To what extent does the proportion of co-ethnics in school affect students’ problem behaviour in school in Western-Europe?’ Problem behaviour in school – sometimes also referred to as behavioural disengagement (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris 2004) or adjustment pro- blems (Berndt and Keefe 1995) – is the extent to which students do not follow the school rules, such as skipping class, coming late or arguing with teachers. To be able to tackle the possible aversive effects of being surrounded by fewer co- ethnics in school, it is important to understand why this association exists. The ethnic density hypothesis (Halpern 1993) and the belongingness approach (Benner and Crosnoe 2011) posit a possible explanation for the relationship. According to these theor- etical accounts, students receive more social support from peers and feel more at home at school when they are surrounded by more co-ethnics. Because of this, they would engage in less problem behaviour (Johnson, Crosnoe, and Elder 2001; Benner and Crosnoe 2011). However, the proposed underlying mechanism has rarely been explicitly measured and tested in the school context. The second research question is: ‘To what extent can the relationship between the proportion of co-ethnics in school and students’ problem behav- iour in school be explained by students’ friendships?’ A recent US-based study provides some preliminary answers to this question (Georgiades, Boyle, and Fife 2013). Georgiades, Boyle, and Fife (2013) show that the relationship between the share of co-ethnics in school and problem behaviour is mediated to some extent by stu- dents’ sense of school belonging. A possible reason why only a small mediation effect is found, is that, in this study, belongingness in school refers to feelings of relatedness to teachers and a general connectedness to (people in) the school. However, the share of co-ethnics in school is a characteristic of the peer context and may therefore only affect students’ relationships to peers in school. Hence, we contribute to previous research by explicitly focusing on students’ friendships as an underlying mechanism between the share of co-ethnics and students’ problem behaviour. We answer the research questions by using cross-national comparative data on adolescents in Germany, England, Sweden and the Netherlands (Children of Immi- grants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries (CILS4EU) (Kalter et al. 2013). These data contain information on 18,716 adolescents in 480 schools with different ethnic compositions and thus offer a unique opportunity to examine the research questions. Theory Ethnic composition of schools and problem behaviour in school Several studies have examined the effect of the ethnic composition in school on students’ problem behaviour. Much of this research has examined the consequences of the overall JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 1475 share of ethnic minority students in school (rather than the proportion of co-ethnics). Empirical evidence on the association between the share of ethnic minority students in school and problem behaviour is mixed. While Finn and Voelkl (1993) find that students exhibit more school-related problem behaviour when they attend a school with a higher share of ethnic minority students, Demanet and Van Houtte (2012) find no significant association. In contrast, Gieling, Vollebergh, and van Dorsselaer (2010), who focus on more severe indicators of misbehaviour, show that ethnic minority students who attend a school with a higher share of ethnic minority students exhibit less delinquent and aggres- sive behaviour. Demanet and Van Houtte (2014) even report that both ethnic minority and ethnic majority students engage in less school-related problem behaviour in schools