904 PALUCK AND SHEPHERD The term social referent does not indicate a static student trait p and s tis ca cial ref by gaining ties.For the purpo h skit fir al refe ts,three girls and tw nf the as whether the of inter ention so zed her hos e of students.We find that they did no One of the boys related a stor about gettin I at sch ch perpetu 0ng01 cycle rse of the year. ative spoke a bout the ncepts of hy cial refe nal nool s.We stratified the pool by on his or tion program.S of these students refu ed participation in the stop to th below).leaving 24 social referent students who onnected to the intervention social re to the firs dely udents and nd eight s small 31k0 ys:19 sopho n we of follow-up events during the scho who wer for the p ent m es Inter ention social referent ialrefereatsndcntswhe from the pool of eligibl social referents. ted a MES Intervention cial refer nts al The NAMES eir NAMES assment to the student body and to facilitate public discussion nt sloga ocal referents de cat the des rintive idea tha cribed their own harassment and invited and the ring the spring.intervention social referents sold wrist tor from ment message they had se nent at their hool.Students were asked to identify vents)an"all Behavioral Outcome Measures nts dis t in and Behavior reported by teachers.Before the of th onsultation with ADl facilitators s survey to all teachers at the school and to administrative staff who e read by the The argets an The ent ted by fellow student ed by other stu on the rumor.the girl is publically defamed with the word slut in cords of all disciplinary events receiving administrative attention
The term social referent does not indicate a static student trait, but rather a dynamic social status. Students can lose social referent status by losing friendship and status ties to other students over time, or become social referents by gaining ties. For the purposes of studying the influence of the social referents who were randomly assigned to participate in the intervention program, our primary concern was whether the interactions of intervention social referents would change to a significantly different degree than those of control social referent students. We find that they did not; Table 4A (Appendix) illustrates that, as a group, the intervention and control students maintained their social referent status over the course of the year. Random assignment of social referents to intervention. The final pool contained 83 eligible social referent students: 42 widely known students and 41 clique leaders. We stratified the pool by type of student and by grade level, and used a random number to select 30 students, 15 of each type, to participate in the intervention program. Six of these students refused participation in the program (we address the modeling complications of noncompliance below), leaving 24 social referent students who participated in the intervention (13 widely known students and 11 clique leaders; 16 girls and eight boys; eight sophomores, eight juniors, and eight seniors), and 53 control social referent students who did not participate in the intervention program (27 widely known student alternates and 26 clique leader alternates; 31 girls and 22 boys; 19 sophomores, 11 juniors, and 23 seniors). Below, when we refer to control social referents, we mean those social referent students who were not randomly selected for the program; by intervention social referents, we mean social referent students who were randomly assigned to participate in the intervention program from the pool of eligible social referents. Intervention The NAMES assembly program functions as a platform to broadcast certain students’ experiences with and reactions to harassment to the student body, and to facilitate public discussion about harassment among students. During the schoolwide assembly conducted in October, the intervention social referents described their own harassment experiences and invited other students to do the same. Intervention social referents first participated in two training sessions to prepare for the assembly. A facilitator from the ADL led activities that prompted reflection on the nature and effects of harassment at their school. Students were asked to identify the various roles that students can play in harassment (e.g., an “ally” to targeted students or a “bystander” to events). Intervention social referents discussed and wrote essays about their own experiences of harassment in these various roles. Teachers from the school, in consultation with ADL facilitators, selected five of these essays to be read by the student authors at the assembly. The essays were selected to represent the perspective of students who had been both targets and perpetrators. The other intervention social referents wrote and performed a skit illustrating common types of harassment at the school and ways to speak out against it. On the day of the assembly, the intervention social referents performed the skit, in which they acted out a rumor spreading to other students about a girl being a “slut.” Both girls and boys pass on the rumor, the girl is publically defamed with the word slut in the school hallway, boys make advances on the girl, and the audience observes the girl’s emotional turmoil. In the concluding scene, another girl defends the girl who has been targeted. After the skit, five of the intervention social referents, three girls and two boys, read their essays on stage. One girl’s essay described the experience of switching elementary schools because a girl had mobilized her group of friends to continuously harass her, whereas another girl spoke of her own insecurities that lead her to make fun of other students. One of the boys related a story about getting in a physical fight at school, which perpetuated an ongoing cycle of aggression. In between the intervention social referents’ performances, an ADL representative spoke about the concepts of bystander, ally, and perpetrator, and the effects of harassment. At the end of the assembly, there was an open microphone session in which any student could share his or her own experiences with harassment. Twenty-four students from the audience volunteered to speak at the microphone. Many echoed the intervention social referents’ call for tolerance and a stop to the “drama.” Over half the students who spoke were not socially connected to the intervention social referents, according to the first social network survey, indicating that the group of speakers represented diverse positions in the school social network. After the assembly, all students at the school were divided into small groups to discuss the assembly. Intervention social referents and adult supervisors facilitated these small-group sessions. A number of follow-up events during the school year reinforced this association between the intervention social referents and antiharassment messages. Intervention social referents read announcements regarding the consequences of harassment over the loudspeaker during morning announcements for several weeks, and designated a special “NAMES” table at lunch period two times during the year where they sat to eat and chat with any passersby about ways to report harassment or concerns about harassment. Intervention social referents also created a series of magentacolored posters that each featured a different photo of intervention social referents wearing their NAMES t-shirts, and one of several anti-harassment slogans such as “Whatever your story, I’ll listen” and “People who spread rumors are no friends of mine.” The slogans were designed to communicate the descriptive idea that intervention social referents behaved in a tolerant manner and the prescriptive idea that they would sanction harassment behavior. Finally, during the spring, intervention social referents sold wristbands for $1 featuring an anti-harassment message they had selected (“Don’t stand by, be an ally”). Behavioral Outcome Measures Behavior reported by teachers. Before the start of the NAMES program and at the end of the year, we administered a survey to all teachers at the school and to administrative staff who worked closely with students. Teachers and administrators used the school roster to nominate students who they perceived as popular, respected by fellow students, and harassed by other students. They also nominated students who defended those who were harassed, and students who “contributed to a negative school environment.” Students received 1 point in each of these categories for each nomination from a teacher or an administrator. Disciplinary records. We obtained the complete school records of all disciplinary events receiving administrative attention 904 PALUCK AND SHEPHERD This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly
SALIENCE OF SOCIAL REFERENTS 905 throughout the school year.The disciplinary data included in hat originated from eac student.that is.their own nominations o hara (in of ties to both variable reflects the fact that only three tudents wer ode f six ties,which did not change results) effects regre Although the wristband tudents of eing ated with rof support fo which students bought the wristbands nique if there is an lying lincar ship betweer Results to social refe model ssmen uld Analytic Approach inally.w used an instn ental variab ach to correct fo ariable camines the influen ce of the ran As Table 1 indica there are many students in the sample who m assienment (here the contolsocilfrefd who to part cial referents t bu a social network ty o Thus ysis is a conservative of soci on and contro using spend time ties in order to causally relate the students form new ties and umber of ties.and perceptions of be critical predictor of nor ative influe we used the numbe ties to inte ocial reterents at the wav in whic der we are predicting behavior at Wave3 or measuring change from Number of Suudents Spending Time With Intervention and Control Social Referents.Neither.or Both Variable 。for rvey 69
throughout the school year. The disciplinary data included instances of peer conflict and harassment. Despite reports of widespread harassment, official records of these incidents are rarely coded as harassment specifically (only seven out of 403 infractions). School records of “disruptive” behavior reveal that 14 of the 31 disciplinary incidents involved peers, such as displaying “verbal aggression toward peer, posturing to fight,” or “instigating a fight.” Thus, we add these specific incidents to the harassment code and create a dichotomous variable indicating whether each student was disciplined for peer harassment at school. The dichotomous variable reflects the fact that only three students were recorded more than once for a harassment incident. To test whether the intervention had an effect on poor behavior more generally, we also combined all reported disciplinary events for each student into a count variable. Wristband purchases. Although the wristbands only cost $1, we viewed them as a relatively more costly and more public indicator of support for the anti-harassment message, compared with survey responses. We gathered purchase receipts to record which students bought the wristbands. Results Analytic Approach We tested the effects of the randomly assigned intervention social referents on the rest of the students in the school, using linear fixed effects regressions. We measured the effect of social network ties to intervention social referent students (time spent together in the last week), accounting for their ties to control social referent students, on students’ perceptions of collective norms, their beliefs, and their behavior. As Table 1 indicates, there are many students in the sample who are directly exposed to both intervention and control social referents because they spend time with both. Indeed, some control social referents themselves are directly exposed to intervention social referents. Random assignment within a social network does not create isolated treatment and control groups; rather, random assignment creates different degrees of exposure to intervention social referents depending on the structure of social interactions within the network. Thus, we identified the frequency of social interactions using spend time ties in order to causally relate the dosage of exposure to intervention social referents from zero to n number of ties, and perceptions of norms or anti-harassment behavior. In our regressions, we examined the effect of each student’s treatment dosage, measured in terms of the number of the student’s direct ties to randomly assigned intervention social referents, controlling for the student’s total number of ties. We only used ties that originated from each student, that is, their own nominations of the students they spent time with (in social network terms, their outdegree). A fixed effects regression based on each individual’s total number of ties to both intervention and control social referents controls for heterogeneous assignment probabilities induced by the fact that treatment was randomized over a network (see Aronow & Samii, 2012). Specifically, our fixed effects regression includes six dummy variables that index for each individual whether their total number of ties to intervention and control social referents at Wave 1 was zero, one, two, three, four, five, or six (we included a few outliers with more than six total ties in the dummy code for six ties, which did not change our results). The dummy variables of a fixed effects regression analysis account for each individual’s baseline levels of exposure to intervention and control students, and thus their probability of being treated within the network, because the probability of being treated is not equal for every individual. This approach is an appropriate estimation technique if there is an underlying linear relationship between exposure and outcomes (Angrist, 1998; Angrist & Pischke, 2008), and it reflects our hypothesis that greater exposure to social referents who model anti-harassment behaviors should result in greater shifts toward anti-harassment norms and behavior. Finally, we used an instrumental variable approach to correct for the selection bias that was introduced when six students refused the invitation to participate in the intervention. This instrumental variable analysis examines the influence of the randomly assigned group of intervention social referent students, instead of the influence of the group consisting of the social referents who accepted the invitation to participate. Technically, an instrumental variable analysis rescales the effect size by the rate of compliance with the random assignment (here, the proportion of students—24 of 30— who agreed to participate in NAMES). By preserving random assignment in the analysis, we lose power to the extent that untreated students are included in the treatment condition, but we avoid the possibility of bias resulting from whatever factors led some students to agree to and others to refuse participation in the treatment. Thus, instrumental variable analysis is a conservative approach (see Gelman & Hill, 2007, p. 215). The number of any student’s ties to intervention and control social referents changes over time, as students form new ties and drop former ties. To account for changes in interactions over time, our critical predictor of normative influence, we used the number of ties to intervention social referents at the wave in which the outcome measure was collected in our regressions. For example, if we are predicting behavior at Wave 3 or measuring change from Table 1 Number of Students Spending Time With Intervention and Control Social Referents, Neither, or Both Variable Students with ties to intervention social referents, no ties to control Students with ties to control social referents, no ties to intervention Students with ties to both intervention and control students Students with no ties to either intervention or control social referents n for survey wave Wave 1 18 63 62 117 260 Wave 2 19 59 100 73 250 Wave 3 13 51 95 61 220 Note. Ties indicate student reports of time spent with the intervention or control student. SALIENCE OF SOCIAL REFERENTS 905 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly