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Abstract
This article assesses whether social-ethnic composition influences students' school misconduct. Based on general strain theory, we expect to find that individual sense of futility acts as an intermediate mechanism. Starting from cultural deprivation and oppositional culture theory, however, we hypothesize that a shared school culture of futility acts as mediator. Multilevel analyses of data from the Flemish Educational Assessment, consisting of 11,872 students in 85 schools, showed that ethnic composition has an impact on school misconduct: there is more deviance in ethnically mixed schools than in ethnic concentration schools due to a greater student sense of futility. The presence of a culture of futility did not affect the probability of being deviant. These results were true only for natives: school factors did not affect migrants' deviancy. We conclude that, although a dispersal of ethnically diverse students across all schools is favorable, this can yield negative side effects.
Notes
1We used HLM6 to perform an overdispersed Poisson model with constant exposure, which yielded the same basic image as the linear multilevel model. Following that, we also took the square root of our dependent variable, reducing its skewness to normality. This mechanism produced the same basic results as the ones shown in Tables 3–5.
2γ* = 0.000 (SE = 0.001); p > .05.
Note. HLM = hierarchical linear modelling. χ2 (84, N = 11,872) = 887.970.
***p ≤ .001.
Note. The unstandardized (γ) and standardized (γ*) gamma coefficients are presented, with the standard errors appearing in parentheses, and with the variance components U.
*p ≤ .05; **p < .01; ***p ≤ .001.
Note. The unstandardized (γ) and standardized (γ*) gamma coefficients are presented, with the standard errors appearing in parentheses, and with the variance components U.
°p = .054; *p ≤ .05; **p < .01; ***p ≤ .001.
Note. The unstandardized (γ) and standardized (γ*) gamma coefficients are presented, with the standard errors appearing in parentheses, and with the variance components U.
*p ≤ .05; **p < .01; ***p ≤ .001.