Civic Engagement as a Moderator of the Association Between Students' Residential Mobility and Education Outcomes

• In Event: Promoting Positive Adaptation Among Homeless and Highly Mobile Students

Abstract

Housing instability represents a significant barrier to the educational success of urban youth. Youth may become resilient to stressors such as residential mobility when they are meaningfully engaged in their schools and communities. This study addresses an important gap in the research literature on how to assist mobile students by directly testing the hypothesis that engaging students in the civic life of their school may counterweigh the effect of residential mobility on students’ education outcomes, namely achievement, attendance, and behavior. It also makes a contribution to the literature by accounting for school mobility (i.e., changing schools, which is concurrent with only about one quarter of all residential moves) in the analysis. The specific research questions are: (1) What differences in attendance, academic grades, and suspensions are observed among urban middle school students who change residences versus those who do not? (2) Is the association of changing residences and attendance, grades, and behavior moderated by civic engagement at school?
This study estimated regression models of student survey and school administrative panel data from 2,014 racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse students in 10 middle schools in a large urban district in the Southeast U.S. in a non-equivalent comparison group design to examine changes in students’ education outcomes among four groups: (1) those who experienced at least one residential move but did not change schools; (2) those who changed residences and schools; (3) those who changed only schools but not residences; and (4) those who changed neither residences nor schools. Only students who did not change residences during the previous school year were included in the present study (in this way, all students in the sample were “equivalent at baseline” in terms of their recent residential mobility). The dependent variables changes from the previous school year in average course grades, attendance rate, and suspension rate were measured district administrative records. An interaction of mobility category and school civic engagement, measured via student self-report of leadership in a group or club at school and attendance at after-school programs, was added to initial regression models to address the second research question.
The results showed that, compared to students who did not move, students who changed residences had significantly lower attendance rates and grades and significantly higher suspension rates, while controlling for outcomes in the previous school year and demographics. Among the four mobility categories examined in this study, students who stay at the same school but experience a residential move are worst off. The results further suggested that there were significant interactions of school civic engagement and residential mobility. In general, the negative associations of residential mobility and students’ education outcomes were attenuated when students were civically engaged in school (see Table 1 and Figure 1). This study provides evidence for one measure that schools may take to partially offset the deleterious association of mobility and student outcomes—engaging students in the civic life of the school.

Authors

• Adam Voight, Cleveland State University

• Regina J Giraldo-Garcia, Cleveland State University

• Beth Shinn