Research project School-contextual pathways to psychological symptoms among Swedish youth
This project focuses on three sets of school-contextual conditions which have been subject to structural changes during the past decades in Sweden – school leadership, teachers’ working conditions, and school segregation – and their links to students’ psychological health.
This project focuses on three sets of school-contextual conditions which have been subject to structural changes during the past decades in Sweden – school leadership, teachers’ working conditions, and school segregation – and their links (alone and in combination) to students’ psychological health.
Our overarching hypotheses are that 1) poor correspondence with the ideas of ‘effective schools’ (reflecting school leadership), 2) stressed teachers (reflecting poor working conditions), and 3) clusters of schools with disadvantaged student composition profiles along socioeconomic and ethnic lines (reflecting school segregation), are linked with poorer student health in terms of internalizing and externalizing problems. We will also assess how these contextual conditions differ between schools, and whether they contribute to accounting for between-school differences in student health.
Our data material combines student and teacher information from two separate data collections performed in 2014 comprising 81 senior-level schools. Student information comes from the Stockholm School Survey, a total sample of ninth-graders in all public and many independent schools in Stockholm municipality (n=5,122; response rate 83%). The Teacher Survey was carried out by our research group through a web-based questionnaire sent to all senior-level teachers in the participating schools (n=1,105; response rate 57%). The main method of analysis will be multilevel structural equation modelling.
By adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the role of school-contextual conditions for student’s psychological health, we aim to uncover some of the pathways through which these influences are likely to operate. Such knowledge may provide guidelines as to where in the school structure health promoting action should be taken in order to gain optimal results.
Project description
Three major changes in Swedish schools are assumed to have given rise to greater differences in their capacity to promote student health in the wake of the 1990s reforms, reflected in school leadership, teachers’ working conditions and school segregation.
Effective schools: the capacity of leadership
The 1990s reforms gave principals greater space for asserting goals and practicing leadership. Along with this increased power came higher expectations to create consensus and credibility around their ambitions for the school. The process needed for a well-functioning school were, from the perspective of the state authorities, largely expected to correspond to ideas raised in the ‘effective schools’ literature. One of the most influential studies in this field was carried out by Michael Rutter and his colleagues in the 1970s London. Based on their empirical studies, it was shown that some educational environments were more successful than others in terms of introducing adolescents into adulthood, and in the way that the school managed to counteract negative effects of external factors. Another finding was that school environments characterized by rewards and praise were more productive compared to harsh and disciplinary environments. An additionally important result was that positive school influences had benefits for both advantaged and disadvantaged students. To explain their findings, Rutter et al. coined the term ‘school ethos’ which broadly refers to the beliefs, values, and norms permeating the school and manifesting themselves in the way that teachers and students relate, interact, and behave towards each other.
More recent studies on effective schools have placed a much greater emphasis on principals in terms of their capacity to articulate a vision for the school and to create the shared meaning and common goals needed to reach this vision. The underlying idea is that higher levels in the school structure should provide the necessary conditions for processes at lower levels to come into force. Additionally important features of effective schools, still advocated today, are high expectations for students, providing a safe and orderly environment, a strong academic focus, monitoring of student progress and positive home-school relations. Several empirical studies have shown that schools with such features are characterized by higher school performance, a lower degree of behavioural problems as well as less alcohol and drug use among their students. Although more seldom focused upon, indicators of effective schools have also been shown to contribute positively to students’ psychological health. The degree to which principals have managed to implement “effectiveness characteristics” at their schools can be expected to show in the school’s level of student-reported social support from teachers and in teacher ratings of ‘collective efficacy’ and ‘sense of coherence’ as well as in lower bullying rates among students, all of which can impede the development of psychological health problems in the student population.
Teachers’ working conditions: the role of teacher stress
The increased burden of administration and documentation caused by the 1990s and 2010s school reforms has also resulted in a changed situation for Swedish teachers in terms of higher work load, less feedback and support from superiors, less perceived control over their work situation, and higher sick-leave rates from e.g. depression and burnout syndrome. According to the demand-control model, a heavy workload in combination with insufficient freedom to cope with the situation generates unused residual strain which, in the long run, may cause feelings of hopelessness and other stress-related symptoms. Recent studies have established the presence of crossover effects in the work environment, suggesting that experiences of stress, strain, and even burnout syndrome can transfer from one employee to another. Moreover, there may be crossover effects between teachers and their superiors, so that high stress levels among teachers are transmitted to the school management and vice versa, thereby giving rise to a vicious cycle. Through these kinds of processes, schools characterized by a deteriorating work environment run the risk of losing their most qualified and resourceful teachers (including those who contribute most to ‘collective efficacy’ and a strong ‘sense of coherence’) to employers offering better working conditions, something which will weaken the school’s capacity to develop and maintain an ‘effective school’. Moreover, if stress is “contagious” between school staff, it could well transmit to students as well.
Teachers’ work environment is important not only in its own right, but also because it is linked to student learning and well-being. However, to be able to create a beneficial learning environment for their students, teachers must have satisfactory working conditions. Teacher support is vital for students’ academic outcomes but is also positively linked with their school satisfaction and psychological wellbeing. Various types of teacher support have been distinguished in the literature as important for students’ developmental health, with emotional and instrumental support being most often referred to. Emotional support refers to encouragement, esteem, and caring, whereas instrumental support refers to practical assistance such as help to understand a certain phenomenon, solving a problem, or completing a work task. There is clear evidence of variation in student health outcomes between Swedish schools [20], but whether there is between-school variation in teacher support has, to our knowledge, less often been considered. If teachers’ perceptions of their own work environment in terms of workload, or ‘collective efficacy’, differ across senior level schools in Sweden, it seems likely that their opportunity to give support to students should also vary. Any association between school-level concentration of teacher stress and student wellbeing is therefore likely to operate through a reduced quantity and/or quality of teacher support to students. As teachers play a crucial role in setting the standards for classroom behaviour and in fostering an accepting class climate, their degree of availability to students is also important for student wellbeing in terms of reducing bullying and other undesirable behaviours at the school.
School segregation: the clustering of disadvantaged students
School segregation has increased in the wake of the ‘market-oriented’ reforms in Sweden, especially in the larger urban areas, leaving the less attractive schools with an increasingly depleted stock of motivated and socioeconomically advantaged students. The school choice reform has also brought a growing awareness among families about the role of a school’s status, reputation, and supply of social networks, with “white flight” from schools with high concentrations of immigrants as an inexorable consequence. These selection processes mean that differences between schools to an increasing extent tend to reflect the different background characteristics of their student bodies, thus making it difficult to judge whether disparities between e.g. a suburban and an inner-city school are caused by the way in which the school is run (contextual effects) or if it is simply a reflection of the composition of students attending these schools (compositional effects). However, changes in student composition can modify the school climate, and through this, act as a contextual quality that exists “outside” and independent of the individual student.
Related to this is the fact that several studies have reached different conclusions about schools’ “effectiveness” depending on the school’s socio-demographic profile. From the perspective of segregation, hence, compositional characteristics are likely to interfere with the school’s capacity to build effective schools and to provide an “attractive” work environment for their teachers, with some schools facing far more difficult challenges than others. Stemming from the criminological literature, social disorganization theory proposes that indicators of social disorder can create a stressful and unstable atmosphere. When applied to the school context, signs of social disorganization have typically focused upon factors such as school-level distribution of socioeconomically disadvantaged and ethnic minority students, concentration of psychosocial problems, student mobility, and teacher-student ratio. It is thought that these indicators of social disorder undermine the stability of a school and its capacity to promote wellbeing. Much research has pointed to the beneficial effects of school performance and attachment to school in reducing delinquency. Measures of teacher support have also been found to counteract the propensity for various expressions of norm-breaking behaviours among high-risk youth.
Project members
Project managers
Bitte Modin
Professor
Members
Sara Brolin Låftman
Director of studies doctoral level/Senior Lecturer
Ylva Brännström Almquist
Professor
Jannike Kjellström
Research assistant
Gabriella Olsson
Administrativ studierektor
Stephanie Plenty
Assistant professor
Kristiina Rajaleid
Researcher
Julia Sandahl
PhD student
Jerzy Sarnecki
Professor emeritus
Torbjörn Åkerstedt
Professor Emeritus
Viveca Östberg
Professor
