The social ecology of intergenerational closure in school class networks. Socio-spatial conditions of parents’ norm generation and their effects on students’ interpersonal conflicts

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how protective effects of intergenerational closure correspond with conflict networks in school classes. Taking a multilevel ecological perspective, we also consider networks’ socio-spatial conditions. In a first step, we use ERGMs to analyze the association between parental contact and students’ friendship ties, i.e., intergenerational closure (IC). Then, we utilize spatial regressions to analyze direct and moderating effects of a school’s neighborhood on conflicts in the 135 German class networks (N = 3143 student measurements). In accordance with Coleman’s theoretical notions, we find consistent negative effects of IC on the (standardized) density of the conflict networks. Moreover, we show that IC’s impact is particularly strong in neighborhoods with a relatively high concentration of minorities. The results are in line with our theoretical considerations on multilevel network ecologies and the selective pressure of IC against conflict ties. Practically, our results provide evidence that fostering connections among parents (e.g., by implementing opportunity structures for parents to meet) might help to prevent deviating behavior in schools, especially in neighborhoods with relatively large proportions of ethnic minorities.