ERIC Number: EJ927259
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2011-Aug
Pages: 7
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0272-7757
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Peer Effects on High School Aspirations: Evidence from a Sample of Close and Not-so-Close Friends
Mora, Toni; Oreopoulos, Philip
Economics of Education Review, v30 n4 p575-581 Aug 2011
In this paper we investigate how schoolmates influence high school dropout intentions in Catalonia, Spain. Our analysis uses self-reported friends to identify possible peers by assuming that peer influence flows in one direction in cases where one student identifies another as a friend, but the other does not reciprocate. We first estimate the effects of education aspirations of non-reciprocating friends on students' own education aspirations, with and without conditioning on a large set of personality and cognitive characteristics. We then investigate the extent to which the estimated effects are associated with friends' height, weight, BMI, gender and cognitive ability. The estimated impact of non-reciprocating peers' dropout intentions is small and generally not statistically significant: a 10 percentage point increase in the fraction of non-reciprocating peers that intend to drop out increases students' chances of dropping out by about 0.2 percentage points. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)
Descriptors: Evidence, Dropouts, Academic Achievement, Foreign Countries, Peer Influence, Cognitive Ability, High School Students, Academic Aspiration, Personality, Student Characteristics, Correlation, Body Height, Body Weight, Body Composition, Gender Differences, Intention
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: High Schools
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Spain
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A

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