Mapping Decision Points from School-based Incidents to Exclusionary Discipline, Arrest, and Referral to the Juvenile Justice System, United States, 2016-2018 (ICPSR 37498)

Version Date: May 15, 2024

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Principal Investigator(s):
Melissa Sickmund, National Center for Juvenile Justice

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37498.v1

Version V1

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Summary

This two-phase study examined factors influencing decisions that lead from a school-based incident to exclusionary discipline, an arrest, and a referral to the juvenile court. The research team hypothesized that multiple external factors such as race identity, socioeconomic status, and others would negatively impact the decision-maker, and generate harsher punishments for those who are in these vulnerable groups. Phase 1 involved interviewing groups of key stakeholders including school administrators, district administrators, discipline coordinators, juvenile court judges and other staff, law enforcement officers, Positive Behavior Intervention Support (PBIS) coordinators, and child welfare agencies to understand their approaches to behavior management. Phase 2 involved secondary analysis of data from local school districts and the juvenile court with jurisdiction in two counties.

Citation

Sickmund, Melissa. Mapping Decision Points from School-based Incidents to Exclusionary Discipline, Arrest, and Referral to the Juvenile Justice System, United States, 2016-2018. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2024-05-15. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37498.v1

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Funding

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. National Institute of Justice (2016-CK-BX-0018)

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Restrictions

Access to these data is restricted. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a Restricted Data Use Agreement, specify the reason for the request, and obtain IRB approval or notice of exemption for their research.

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Time Period(s)

2016 -- 2018 (2016-2017 and 2017-2018 school years)

Date of Collection

2017-10-01 -- 2019-03-31

Data Collection Notes

  1. The qualitative interview data collected in Phase 1 for this study is not available as part of the data collection at this time.

  2. The initial Phase 2 study design included data collection from two sites. After learning about inconsistencies in data collection practices, the research team excluded site one from study analysis.

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Study Purpose

The purpose of Phase 1 involved interviewing groups of key stakeholders to understand their approaches to behavior management. The goal of Phase 2 was to obtain secondary data from school districts and courts with juvenile jurisdiction to further explore the factors that may lead to exclusionary discipline, potential arrest, and referral to court. The Phase 2 analyses focused on behavior incident records for middle and high schools in the district.

Study Design

Phase 1: Researchers conducted structured interviews with a convenience sample of 10 jurisdictions across the United States between October 2017 and March 2018 to gather information concerning their decision-making practices for school behavior incidents. Participants were asked about the information and policies that form the basis for discipline decisions, how decisions are documented, and the extent to which data on the decisions are collected and reviewed. To achieve a more complete understanding of each jurisdiction's decision-making procedures researchers supplemented the structured interview data with a systematic review of each district's behavior policy to extract information regarding behavior management policies. For each jurisdiction, researchers used the information from the structured interviews to create diagrams outlining the sequence of potential decisions involved in responding to behavior incidents.

Phase 2 - Site Two: Researchers received data from one school district (26,231 students in the 2016-2017 school year) and the court with juvenile jurisdiction. The school district data was shared with researchers at the state Administrative Office of the Courts who identified all of the court records for the youth in the school file and provided a data file that combined school discipline/juvenile court delinquency cases for the study. The unit of count was a student with at least one behavior incident on a day. Each student incident on a day was characterized by the most severe behavior documented for that day. Incidents involving only attendance issues were removed. These refining steps left 10,726 school records to review. The court provided 5,896 records for the students in the education file, which also included any students' history with the court prior to the incident. To identify court cases that were the most likely impetus for a court case, researchers identified court cases that were petitioned within +/- 14 days of a school incident and manually compared offenses to determine if they were matches. Only 84 court cases were identified as the result of a school offense.

Sample

Phase 1 and the site selection of Phase 2 were convenience samples. The student selection in Phase 2 included a census of school administrative records.

Time Method

Cross-sectional

Universe

Public middle and high school students in a western state in the United States.

Unit(s) of Observation

Phase 1: schools and jurisdictions, Phase 2: student-incident on a day

Data Type(s)

Mode of Data Collection

Response Rates

Phase 1: Researchers conducted structured interviews with a convenience sample of 10 jurisdictions across the United States representing 11 school districts.

Phase 2: Researchers received data on 10,726 school records for incidents occurring during the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 school years from one school district with a school population of 26,231 students in the 2016-2017 school year. The court with juvenile jurisdiction provided court case records involving students with school incident records from cases at any point in the student's life. The court provided 5,896 court records for the students in the school file. Only 84 court cases were identified as associated with a school incident during the study period.

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Original Release Date

2024-05-15

Version History

2024-05-15 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

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Notes

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

  • One or more files in this data collection have special restrictions. Restricted data files are not available for direct download from the website; click on the Restricted Data button to learn more.

NACJD logo

This dataset is maintained and distributed by the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD), the criminal justice archive within ICPSR. NACJD is primarily sponsored by three agencies within the U.S. Department of Justice: the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.