Policy Brief

摘要

Because American middle and high schools bring together large numbers of teenagers for long periods of time, they serve as sites of peer culture and social and emotional development, in addition to being centers of instruction and learning. Some of the most important conventional tasks of the teenage years, such as academic progress, are tangled up with some of the riskier realities of this period, such as the tendency for teenage peer culture to reward drinking behavior and also generate social stress that taxes emotional health. The goal of this study was to examine this tangle of teenage experiences and how it varies across schools with different kinds of peer cultures, with the broader objective of highlighting connections between educational and health policies.