| Kazuaki Uekawa
University of Chicago
Mentorship network and social control of deviance: Evidence from American high schools
FINAL REPORT:
We evaluate social network models of the social control of high school students' attitudes and conduct. We analyze mechanisms by which the social organization of student-teacher relationships affects propensities toward in-school deviance, deviant conduct in school, and attitudes toward education. We propose a social network construct called the "mentorship network" that denotes the network of teachers with whom a student interacts in school. We hypothesize that students' development of attitudes and conduct favorable to school and more broadly to education is a positive function of the intensity of student-teacher interactions and that these relationships are reinforced by network closure and the shared occupational commitments of the mentors. Using two national data sets, NELS (National Educational Longitudinal Study) and LSAY (Longitudinal Study of American Youth), we report preliminary findings that are consistent with these expectations, along with other findings about the genesis of students' deviance and norm-compliance in the social organization of high schools.
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