Switching schools could make teens more likely to drink
Northeastern researchers decided to look at how switching schools between middle and high school impacted teens’ substance use.
Students who change schools between eighth and ninth grade are more likely to drink alcohol, according to new research.
Adolescents who switched to another school during that time reported significantly higher rates of drinking alcohol than those who remained in the same building, according to recently published research by Northeastern University assistant sociology, criminology and criminal justice professor Cassie McMillan and fourth-year criminology and justice policy Ph.D. student Kaley Jones.
Tobacco use remained the same.
“We think (these findings reflect) the norms that are associated with different types of substance use,” McMillan says. “Our data is from kids who graduated high school in the 2010s. That was a time where drinking alcohol was very much associated with popularity while smoking cigarettes did not bring status gains. As kids are moving to this new environment, they’re trying to make new friends and better fit in. They might increase their alcohol use to try to gain popularity and climb the status hierarchy.”
“Alternatively, there’s less of a reason to increase your cigarette use, since that wasn’t necessarily associated with popularity. We find that the most popular kids actually decrease their cigarette use. These changes emphasize how people might actually use this transition as a chance to start anew and reduce substance use as a way to gain more popularity.”
McMillan and Jones conducted the research by analyzing samples from a PROSPER study that collected data from over 14,000 youths in 51 different public school networks in Pennsylvania and Iowa through surveys given to students from the time they were in sixth grade. Students were asked the same questions each year so researchers can track changes over time.
The research team looked at samples from students in two different cohorts: one group of students who graduated high school in 2009 and the second who graduated in 2010.
“Hopefully, at some point in the future, we’ll be able to collect data of this size on more contemporary samples,” says McMillan. “But I think that there’s relevance of our findings to (for) teenagers today. Our results suggest that the high school transition intensifies adolescents’ use of substances associated with popularity, which in the 2020s would include activities like vaping nicotine. Adolescents (may) increase their participation in these behaviors, especially if they’re losing friends and reshuffling their peer group. Alternatively, for substances that aren’t associated with popularity, high school transition … might actually benefit some people’s substance use trajectories.”
The pair chose to focus on the transition because while a lot of criminological research focuses on people’s behavior during life changes like getting married or having kids, there’s not as much research on switching schools between middle and high school.
About 80 percent of the students in the survey moved buildings between eighth and ninth grade, while the remaining 20 percent stayed in the same building during this time, helping the researchers compare the impact of moving school buildings.
Editor’s Picks
“This project comes out of work I’ve been doing about the impact of normative school transitions,” says McMillan. “We were really interested in the move from middle to high school because it’s an experience almost all young people go through. … But this very common experience is often overlooked in academic research. We think this oversight is unfortunate because during this early life stage is when a lot of people initiate risky behaviors like substance use.”
They also examined the friendships of the participants. The survey not only asked students about their substance use, but also about their friendships. Researchers looked at the friends students listed on their surveys and came up with a social network of how people were connected, McMillan says.
Researchers then created a multi-level model with information to determine how a student’s substance use shifted over time as well as their friend group, accounting for their substance use before changing schools. They were able to use this model to track a student’s changes in both their friendships and substance use, controlling for existing substance use to look at whether these rates increased when they moved schools, Jones says.
What they found was that students who switched buildings between middle and high school began drinking more when they did so while tobacco use wasn’t impacted by the behavior. The researchers believe that, when factoring in friendships, whether students drank was impacted by their popularity. Students with stronger social connections seemed less inclined to drink during this transition.
“Adolescents drink more after this high school transition compared to if they didn’t experience that and stayed in the same school building,” McMillan said. “However, we’re finding that, on average, adolescents don’t change their tobacco use. When we delved in a little deeper, we found that teenagers who are popular actually see a decline in their cigarette use.”
McMillan says this research could inform the way school districts help students with the transition from middle to high school, whether it’s encouraging students to build friendships through after-school activities or introducing intervention programs.
“One of the takeaways from our findings is that school districts and personnel should be aware of the difficulties that young people face during this transitional period,” she adds. “A lot of friendship turnover happens during this time. Teenagers are very aware of how status hierarchies are changing and they may be preoccupied with their social standing. I think school districts really need to be deliberate in encouraging students to form bonds in contexts that don’t involve risky behavior.”
McMillan and Jones plan to continue their research by looking at the transition between high school and young adulthood using a subsample from the study of students who participated after they graduated high school to look at how friendship stability can impact the substance use trajectory.
So far, they’ve seen indications that people are more inclined to use substances if they stay in touch with high school friends who use them, but people who end friendships with people who use different substances reported a decline in their own usage.
“We found that friendships are not as strong as you may think it is, especially going into young adulthood,” Jones says. “Young adults are less likely to stay in contact with their high school friends than you may think going into adulthood. We have also found that their substance use decreases as a result of making these transitions into a new stage of life.”
