How well individual children fit in at school is bound to have some effect on the likelihood that they will turn to drink in adolescence. But what about the influence of the group dynamic generated by the whole school and the environmental factors that shape it?

A four-year-study conducted across a swathe of the rural US shows that in schools where children in general are not engaging, drink is more likely to a be a problem for everyone. 

The work by Kimberley Henry and colleagues from Colorado State University is unusual for its interest in the educational context. Much previous US research has confirmed that a child’s individual level of school adjustment – how much they and their friends enjoy school, whether they misbehave – is a predictor of negative outcomes. Parenting programs are part of the personalized remedial strategy.

Published in the journal Prevention Science, the Colorado findings shed light on the importance of the well-being of the school population as a whole and the quality of the context. 

Henry’s team set out to establish how far the likelihood that an individual child would resort to alcohol abuse was affected by the adjustment of the children around them. They also wanted to find out which factors might be the most potent – the genetic, domestic or contextual.

Their data came from a sample of over 40,000 13- and 14-year-olds from a nationally representative survey of rural US communities, carried out between 1996 and 2000. 

Children were questioned anonymously about how much they enjoyed school, how well their friends were fitting in and how much they misbehaved. Information on pupil numbers and the percentage receiving free school meals was obtained from the National Center of Education Statistics. 

The findings largely confirmed previous research: individual school adjustment was associated with alcohol abuse. They also found some support for their own hypothesis that the quality of the school environment had an effect in a child’s propensity to alcohol abuse. 

Simply going to a “bad” school did not turn children to drink; other individual factors were far more salient, but the significance of the differences between schools was very noticeable.

So, to take the case of two students with a comparable level of adjustment, one of whom attended a school where children were generally well acclimatized and the other where children were unhappy – the second student was 30% more likely to turn to alcohol.

The researchers say their findings show that when trying to understand alcohol abuse and other negative behavior, ecological approaches are crucial. “Contextual effects are consequences of emergent properties of groups or social settings, and thus they cannot be accounted for at the individual level.”  

So they see potential in interventions that tackle the needs of the school population as a whole and attend to the quality of the environment where students spend so much of their young lives. 

See: Henry K L, Stanley L R, Edwards R W, Harkabus L C and Chapin L A (2009), “Individual and Contextual Effects of School Adjustment on Adolescent Alcohol Use,” Prevention Science, 10, 3, 236-247