Social contagion and high school dropout: The role of friends, romantic partners, and siblings.
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social contagion theories suggest that adolescents in relationships with same-age high school dropouts should be at a greater risk of dropping out themselves. Yet, few studies have examined this premise, and none have considered all potentially influential same-age intimates, focusing instead on only either friends or siblings. Moreover, a key influence in adolescents’ social worlds, romantic partners, has been ignored. The goal of this study was to provide a comprehensive view of dropout contagion by considering occurrences of dropout among friends, siblings, and romantic partners. Data came from a sample of Canadian adolescents (N = 545) comprising one third of high school dropouts; a second third of carefully matched at-risk but persevering schoolmates; and a last third of average, not-at-risk students. As predicted, adolescents were at greater risk of dropping out when a member of their network had recently left school (i.e., in the past year, OR = 3.11; 95% CI [1.78, 6.27]), with independent associations of nontrivial sizes for occurrences of dropout among friends, romantic partners, and siblings (ORs between 1.97 [95% CI 1.25, 3.41] and 3.12 [95% CI 1.23, 11.0]). Moreover, adolescents seemed particularly at risk of quitting school (OR = 4.88; 95% CI [2.54, 12.5]) when their networks included more than one type of same-age intimate (e.g., a friend and a sibling) who had recently dropped out. Findings suggest that social contagion of dropout is a pervasive phenomenon in low-income schools and that prevention programs should target adolescents with same-age intimates who have recently left school.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it