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November 17, 2004
Children Feel Safe at School if they feel there is Structure at
School
Research has shown that children feel safe if there
is structure at their school. Exactly the opposite holds true when pupils feel that
students run the show at school. Pupils feel unsafe if they see that the rules don’t
apply to everyone. Children in this study felt that inconsistency in the application of
rules and consequences meant that the adults in the school did not care about the students
who were following the rules. Prior studies have linked disorder at school to psychiatric
symptoms, poor grades, and risky behavior.
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book and video shop
Methods
Researchers used data from Robert Wood Johnson’s Urban Health Initiative at New York
University. 3290 students from urban and suburban schools in and around Baltimore,
Detroit, Oakland, Philadelphia and Richmond were recruited for the study. Two-thirds of
the students lived in urban schools while the remainder attended schools in the suburbs.
In the survey researchers measured the pupils feelings of safety and whether they felt
safe the day before. In some instances investigators interviewed students at school on the
weekends. Researchers could then compare school days with weekends to judge whether safety
was an issue of neighborhood or school-based feelings of safety.
Forty six percent of the subjects were more likely to feel unsafe the day preceding the
interview than those who absent the day before the interview.
Pupils whose parents earned more and had higher social status were more likely to feel
safe at school. The strongest risk factor, running across different types of families,
neighborhoods and residential locations, was a sense of school disorder.
Conclusions
Results of the study indicated that 31% of the all respondents stated that some of their
fellow classmates got away with anything. Disorder increased with age and was more likely
to occur in public schools than private schools (33% vs. 18%).
Researchers asserted that a vicious cycle of school disorder and misconduct produces a
culture of low-level violence that represents a continuous threat to adolescents’
sense of safety.
Researchers concluded that children feel safer at school when they feel a sense of
structure at school. Investigators stated that is more effective to promote
teacher-student communication and trust and to enforce rules fairly and consistently than
it is to institute more punitive measures. The most powerful predictor of adolescent well
being discovered to date is having a feeling of connectedness to one’s school, and
students who perceive themselves to be fairly treated and who are invested in their school
life are less likely to engage in risky behaviors.
Complete findings of the study appear in the September 2003 issue of the Journal of Urban
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