Changing Climates of Conflict: A Social Network Experiment in 56 Schools, New Jersey, 2012-2013

Social network data drawn from a large-scale field experiment. Theories of human behavior suggest that individuals attend to the behavior of certain people in their community to understand what is socially normative and adjust their own behavior in response. This experiment tested these theories by randomizing an anti-conflict intervention across 56 New Jersey public middle schools, with 24,191 students. After having comprehensively measured every school's social network, randomly selected seed groups of 20-32 students from randomly selected schools were assigned to an intervention that encouraged public stances against conflict at school. The data allowed for comparisons between treatment and control groups, and also provided variables to analyze social networks to examine the impact of social referents.Surveys were conducted at the start and end of the 2012-2013 school year, the year in which the experiment was conducted. The survey data contains social network variables based on the peers with whom the respondent chooses to spend time. Survey data also include respondents' perceived descriptive and prescriptive norms of conflict at the schools surveyed, as well as administrative data on the schools and demographics of respondents. Demographic variables include gender, grade, age, height, weight, race/ethnicity, language, household characteristics, and demographic variables obtained from school administrative records.