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.

本数据集收录的数据源自一项大规模实地实验所获取的社交网络数据。人类行为理论指出，个体会关注社群中特定人群的行为，以此明确社会规范，并据此调整自身行为。本实验通过在新泽西州56所公立中学中随机分配反冲突干预举措，共涉及24191名学生，以此对上述理论进行验证。研究人员首先全面测绘了每所学校的社交网络结构，随后从随机抽取的学校中选取20至32名学生组成随机种子组，为其安排旨在鼓励学生公开反对校园冲突的干预措施。本数据集可用于对比实验组与对照组的差异，同时也提供了社交网络分析所需的变量，以探究社会参照对象所产生的影响。
本次问卷调查分别于2012-2013学年（即本实验开展的学年）的期初与期末进行。问卷数据包含基于受访者选择共度时光的同伴所构建的社交网络变量；此外，问卷数据还涵盖受访者对受访学校内冲突的感知描述性规范与指令性规范，同时包含学校行政记录数据以及受访者的人口统计学信息。
本数据集仅包含一个数据表，共包含24471条样本、482个变量。数据集内的人口统计学变量包括性别、年级、年龄、身高、体重、种族/族裔、语言、家庭特征，以及从学校行政记录中获取的人口统计学信息。