Peer gender composition and non-cognitive factors

ABSTRACT

This note studies the relationship between the gender composition of a student’s peers and two of their non-cognitive factors: sense of belonging and self-worth. Using data from Add Health and exploiting idiosyncratic variation in the share of female peers across grades within schools, I find positive but small effects of a higher share of female peers for male students. I do not find statistically significant effects for female students, but I can rule out large positive effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-cognitive factors
• peer effects
• educational economics
• sense of belonging
• self-worth

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I21
• J16

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

¹ The eight questions were chosen from the in-school questionnaire because they most closely reflected the desired outcomes. A full list of questions can be found in the Add Health Codebook Explorer (https://addhealth.cpc.unc.edu/documentation/codebook-explorer/#/).

Additional information

Funding

No direct support was received from grant [P01-HD31921] for this analysis.