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The research program conducted by Program 3 focuses on institutional peer effects. Although individual choices often govern peer-group formation and behavior, social institutions such as schools and housing projects can have a strong influence on the composition of peer groups. Institutional design policies at the macro-level, such as school choice initiatives, academic tracking, the timing of transition to middle school, and neighborhood reinvestment incentives, may indirectly influence adolescence drug use by altering opportunities for drug-use diffusion. Program 3 seeks to explore the impact of classroom, school, and neighborhood contexts on substance-related behaviors, with particular attention to peer group composition as a contextual variable.
GOALS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Program 3 addresses three main research questions:
• How do overall rates of adolescent drug use vary with the distribution of high-risk individuals across classrooms within a school, schools within a district, or neighborhoods within a city?
• Are there differences across schools, districts, neighborhoods, or cities in the probability of drug use for a high risk individual, and what observable characteristics explain these differences?
• Given initial drug use in a school or neighborhood, what institutional factors accelerate or inhibit diffusion to new users?
PROJECTS
Researchers in Program 3 primarily investigate these institutional effects through analysis of existing data. The primary dataset for analysis consists of the administrative records provided by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NC DPI). Other datasets that are used in analyses include Census Bureau information, tax records, school suspension for drug use records, arrest records for drug possession and sales, and geographic information systems (GIS) coding of drug use.
Sample work from this area of research includes examinations of:
- the relationship between the type of school attended by 6th grade students and their long-term disciplinary outcomes
- specific and general deterrent effects of out-of-school suspension as a punishment for substance-related and other offenses
- the effects of exposure to retained students in the classroom
- the impact of classroom exposure to students with prior records of substance-related and other infractions in NC high schools
- the impact of in-school-suspension on recidivism and peer contagion effects
PEOPLE
Jacob Vigdor, Ph.D. Principal Investigator, Associate Professor of Public Policy Studies and Economics
Clara Muschkin, Ph.D., Research Scientist
Philip Cook, Ph.D., Professor
Robert MacCoun, Ph.D., Professor (University of California-Berkeley)
Brian Jacob, Ph.D., Assistant Professor ( Harvard University)
Joshua Kinsler, M.A., Graduate student
For more information about Program 3, please contact Jacob Vigdor at jacob.vigdor@duke.edu.
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