Changing Climates of Conflict: A Social Network Experiment in 56 Schools, New Jersey, 2012-2013

The data in this collection are social network data drawn from a large-scale field experiment. Theories of human behavior suggest that individuals attend to the behavior of certain people in their community to understand what is socially normative and adjust their own behavior in response. This experiment tested these theories by randomizing an anti-conflict intervention across 56 New Jersey public middle schools, with 24,191 students. After having comprehensively measured every school's social network, randomly selected seed groups of 20-32 students from randomly selected schools were assigned to an intervention that encouraged public stances against conflict at school. The data allowed for comparisons between treatment and control groups, and also provided variables to analyze social networks to examine the impact of social referents. Surveys were conducted at the start and end of the 2012-2013 school year, the year in which the experiment was conducted. The survey data contains social network variables based on the peers with whom the respondent chooses to spend time. Survey data also include respondents' perceived descriptive and prescriptive norms of conflict at the schools surveyed, as well as administrative data on the schools and demographics of respondents. The collection includes one dataset, with 482 variables for 24,471 cases. Demographic variables in the collection include gender, grade, age, height, weight, race/ethnicity, language, household characteristics, and demographic variables obtained from school administrative records.

本数据集收录了源自大规模实地实验的社交网络数据。人类行为理论指出，个体倾向于关注其社区中特定人群的行为，以理解社会规范并据此调整自身行为。本研究通过在56所新泽西州公立中学中随机分配冲突干预措施，对24,191名学生进行了实验，以检验上述理论。实验全面测量了每所学校的社交网络，并从随机选取的学校中随机选取了20-32名学生的种子小组，分配了鼓励公开反对学校冲突的干预措施。数据允许对处理组和对照组进行比较，并提供了分析社交网络以检验社会参照物影响的相关变量。在2012-2013学年度，即实验进行的学年，对调查对象进行了起始和结束阶段的调查。调查数据包含了基于受访者选择的共同度较高的同伴群体的社交网络变量，同时还包括了受访者对所调查学校冲突的描述性和规范性规范的感知，以及学校和管理记录中的受访者人口统计数据。该数据集包含一个数据集，共有482个变量，针对24,471个案例。数据集中的人口统计变量包括性别、年级、年龄、身高、体重、种族/民族、语言、家庭特征以及来自学校管理记录的人口统计变量。