RISE Up Study- stress
Description
The Reducing Inequities through Social and Educational Change (RISE Up) Study is a natural experiment comparing a cohort of mostly Latinx adolescents from low-income neighborhoods of Los Angeles who applied to high-performing, public, charter high schools in 2013 and 2014. The study examines those who applied to these high performing schools, comparing lottery winners vs. lottery waitlsted students. Prior results of this study have found that lottery winners had lower rates of substance use and delinquent behaviors compared to those waitlisted. We also found that lottery winners had lower rates of self-reported obesity and poor physical health, but only among males. Among females, lottery winners had much higher rates of obesity and poor physical health. Thus, we hypothesized that exposure to high performing schools would lead to more stress among females, but lead to lower or no differences in stress among males. We hypothesized similar patterns regarding self-reported discrimination. Our results regarding stress were consistent with our hypothesis. We found that among females, lottery winners reported more stress than lottery waitlisters. Among males, lottery winners reported less stress than lottery waitlisters. We found no differences in self-reported discrimination among lottery winners vs. waitlisted among males or females.
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Steps to reproduce
We recruited 1270 adolescents who applied to 5 high-performing charter schools in Los Angeles in 2013 and 2014 (two consecutive academic years). Eligible subjects were those admitted to these schools through their random admission lottery. We recruited a random subset of lottery winners and those waitlisted with the goal of obtaining equal numbers of winners and waitlisted students from each of the 5 schools. We studied high-performing charter high schools that were over-subscribed (more applicants than seats available) and admitted students based on a random lottery. This allowed us to recruit applicants to these schools for participation in our study and observe comparable groups of low-income students exposed to higher- and lower-performing schools. Subjects were recruited at entry into 9th grade and surveyed every 1-2 years through age 22. The study is ongoing with plans to continue following subjects through 2026 (age 26). This dataset includes baseline student and parental demographics, self-reported stress and discrimination, and baseline grade point average derived from middle school transcripts. We compared lottery winners to those waitlisted (EXP1=1 vs 0, respectively). Self-reported stress and discrimination were collected prospectively from adolescence into early adulthood at each time point of the survey (time=0-6). time 0=baseline, time1=grade 10, time2=grade11, time3=grade12, time4=age20, time5=age21 time6=age22. We used hierachical models to examine repeated measures of stress over time for lottery winners/waitlisted students stratified by gender. The hierarchical models adjust for multiple measures of the outcomes over time and students clustered by school. We examined stress during adolescence (time=0-4) using the adolescent stress questionnaire (ASQ) and stress during early adulthood (time=5-6) using the perceived stress scale. Stress was not measured at time=3 (grade 12). We also examined perceived discrimination at time=5 using the everyday discrimination scale. Our analyses adjusted for sociodemographic measures were gathered in the baseline survey and were all self-reported by the adolescent. These included gender (male, female, other), race/ethnicity, country of birth, native language, and parental demographics (country of birth, employment, and education attainment). We use the term gender rather than sex because that is how we asked the question in our survey. Given the distribution by race/ethnicity in the sample, respondents were categorized as Latinx versus non-Latinx. We adjusted for middle school grade point average derived from school transcripts and self-report. We also adjusted for the combination of charter schools that students applied to, referred to as the risk set (criskset).
Institutions
- University of California Los Angeles StoreCA, Los Angeles