These findings are notably different than a previous study in which perceptions of school safety, respect, and authoritative disciplinary style were each consistently predictive of beneficial social-emotional health outcomes including depression, stress, self-efficacy, grit, and hopelessness, which may hint at important differences between the determinants of these outcomes. There are several potential mechanisms for these findings interpreted through the lens of Jessor’s theory of problem behavior, which framed problem behavior as the developmental result of three systems: personality, perceived environment, and behavior. School order may be protective for most problem behaviors by permitting students greater personal control and elevating expectations for academic achievement. Teacher respect for students validates prior literature on the importance of social support and quality of positive social relationships, but the more limited significance of teacher support for college suggests that this school climate measure may either be overly specific or otherwise does not reflect an important contextual factor for student behaviors and decision-making. Interestingly, the data revealed a far less robust association between an authoritative disciplinary style and outcomes than anticipated. This could be due to several reasons including: 1) study design bias or 2) true lack of an association indicating that high risk behaviors are less subject to authoritative school disciplinary style than mental health outcomes.
That estimates were qualitatively concordant with a protective effect but not statistically significant, rolling grow tables suggests the former as a more likely explanation. Authoritarian disciplinary style was associated with increased cannabis use and the neglectful disciplinary style was associated with increased risky behavior and worsened academic outcomes. Meanwhile the permissive disciplinary style had the opposite effect for academic outcomes. Together these findings add additional evidence that teachers can be a key source of social support for adolescent development and that relationships with teachers influence both academic outcomes and engagement in risky behaviors.The study results should be considered within the following limitations. Measures of school climate were based upon student report. Thus it is possible that the student’s behaviors influenced their perceptions of school climate rather than vice versa. We tried to mitigate this reverse causal relationship by examining the relationship of school climate perceptions measured at 10th grade with outcomes measured at 11th grade, controlling for the outcome at baseline. Nevertheless, the field of school climate is moving toward multidimensional measures which include student self-report and studies have confirmed high internal validity of many student-reported variables when examined at the school level. Behavioral outcomes were also obtained via student self-report.
Some outcomes were dichotomized to aid interpretability and because some outcomes are relatively rare, however, dichotomizing can introduce measurement bias, reduce statistical power, and underestimate variability between groups. The parental disciplinary style used as a covariate grossly approximated potential confounders such as parental monitoring, however, this measure may introduce measurement bias as these questions may not align well with commonly held conceptions of parenting in Latinx communities. This study was observational in nature so we cannot draw conclusions about causality. The generalizability of this study is further hampered by the great heterogeneity of school climate definitions in the literature. The baseline differences between the analytic sample and those lost to follow-up were relatively minor but could indicate the possibility of attrition bias. Lastly, the student population was mostly Latinx. While the sample was roughly similar to the population of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the results may not be generalizable to other student populations. Future studies may delve deeper into the Latinx experience and how school climate may better promote adolescent health and development.Our findings support ongoing reform initiatives to measure student perspectives and intervene on school climate with the expectation of downstream benefits to student health and academic achievement, with reaffirmation in a predominantly Latinx student population.
Such interventions have become more common including social-emotional learning interventions, school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports, bullying prevention, community development programs, and interventions to improve teacher working conditions. These interventions are understandably cross-disciplinary. Therefore our findings also reaffirm school health practitioners’ use of the CDC’s Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child framework and direct engagement with youth toward cross-disciplinary systems change. As the isolation of SARS-CoV-2 has reminded us, the settings in which youth study and create relationships with peers and adults outside the home shape their long-term health and educational trajectories with consequences that reverberate throughout the life course. Adolescents are at the threshold of transitioning to adulthood from a developmental and social perspective and hence the potential consequences of risky health behaviors such as substance use or poor academic performance can be highly impactful on their long-term health trajectories. School climate is a measurable and changeable construct and could be a valuable public health target, particularly relevant during adolescence when youth are especially sensitive to social influences. To the extent that school climate drives health, such an approach may broaden the scope of schools from centers for academic learning to platforms for human thriving, transforming vicious cycles to virtuous ones.BRICK-AND-MORTAR cannabis outlets are now commonplace in the 37 U.S. states that have legalized medical or recreational cannabis . One indicator relevant to cannabis-related health outcomes is the physical availability of cannabis, commonly measured by the number of cannabis outlets within a given geographic area . Greater physical availability is hypothesized to make it easier to find, purchase, and use legal cannabis . Cannabis outlet density has also been linked to cannabis use and cannabis use disorder . Cannabis use is associated with not only harms but also potential benefits . This research relies on complete, accurate listings of outlet locations. Although direct observation of outlets is the gold standard for generating listings, Cao et al. demonstrated that crowd sourced websites can be used to validly enumerate brick-and-mortar outlets in California. This approach has been widely used in empirical research . However, to our knowledge, no studies have tested whether such platforms can measure physical availability of cannabis through home delivery services. Home delivery represents a growing proportion of legal retail cannabis sales . Consumers can often choose between large online deliverers and local brick-and-mortar outlets offering home delivery. Compared with brick-and-mortar outlets, delivery services may have larger sales volume, growing rack serve more tech-savvy consumers, and promote more at-home rather than in-community use; these factors have potentially important implications regarding the populations most affected by cannabis legalization . Underage cannabis purchases, for example, may increase alongside home delivery because age verification is done at the doorstep rather than in-store. Cannabis availability research that incorporates home delivery is absent. A primary barrier is lack of data. Traditional availability research characterizes people as “exposed” to the density of outlets in their residential neighborhoods . To conduct analogous research for home delivery, researchers need listings of all retailers offering home delivery and information on the geographic zones to which each retailer delivers. Yet this information is not recorded in official license listings, and direct observation of all home delivery transactions is impossible. In this methodological pilot study, we adapted Cao et al.’s method for enumerating brick-and-mortar cannabis outlets to explore the feasibility of using crowd sourced websites to measure availability of legal cannabis home delivery. We web scraped data from Weedmaps—the largest crowd sourced website for cannabis retail—to quantify the number of cannabis retailers delivering to specific locations, and conducted telephone calls with a sub-sample of delivery businesses to shed further light on data quality. We focused on California, the state with the longest history of cannabis legalization and home to the world’s largest legal cannabis market.
Our study reveals practical and conceptual challenges that must be overcome before proceeding with a full-scale validation and developing methodological standards .Weedmaps is a popular promotional website that allows cannabis retailers to list their business address, website, contact information, license type , and modes of sale . Among available crowd sourced websites , only Weedmaps allows users to input an address or geographic coordinates and return listings of all cannabis retailers delivering to that location. We exploited this feature to quantify availability of cannabis home delivery. We measured how many home delivery retailers served the geographic centroid of each Census block group in California . Between July 23, 2020, and August 5, 2020, we applied a Python-based program to query the application programming interface underlying Weedmaps by inputting the coordinates for each centroid and extracting the number of cannabis retailers reporting to deliver to that location. For comparison, in July 2020, we also web scraped listings of all brick-and-mortar outlets. After geocoding the listing addresses, we tabulated counts of brick-and-mortar outlets in each block group. See the Appendix for detail on measurement considerations. To inform interpretations and identify potential measurement challenges and limitations, we conducted two types of verification. First, we purposively selected four block groups representing a range of commercial landscapes and policy contexts, and conducted an exhaustive verification of all delivery businesses reporting to serve them . For each of the 47 delivery businesses reporting to serve these four block groups, one coauthor conducted brief, unstructured telephone interviews to verify that the business delivered to the address corresponding to the block group centroid. They also asked how the delivery region was defined, if at all, and whether it varied by time of day, order characteristics, or other factors. Second, we randomly selected 15 delivery-only retailers. For each, one coauthor reviewed the business’s website to determine whether it was possible to identify a clearly defined delivery region. If no such region could be determined, or no website was available, the coauthor called the business to verify its delivery region and any variation by time of day, order characteristics, or other factors.Of the 47 cannabis delivery retailers that reported delivery to 4 selected block groups, 11 could not be reached by phone, 36 were successfully contacted, 35 were operational, and 24 confirmed delivering to the designated address. For the 15 randomly selected delivery-only cannabis retailers, we were able to verify clearly defined delivery regions for only 7 . Calls revealed several considerations for using Weedmaps to accurately measure availability of cannabis home delivery. Several retailers reported no fixed delivery zone. Instead, access to delivery depended on the number of existing orders, time of day, staffing levels, whether competing businesses were also open, and order size. Some businesses offered rapid, on-demand delivery whereas others delivered after hours or days because of the above factors or pre-scheduled delivery routes. Some businesses had no telephone listings, suggesting that they operated exclusively through online orders. We also found considerable duplication in the delivery retailers listings. A single business serving three different towns might have a separate listing for each town.Widespread availability of cannabis home delivery could have substantial public health implications, but little data on delivery exists. This methodological pilot study demonstrates the feasibility of using Weedmaps to measure availability of cannabis home delivery. We successfully implemented an automated web scraping algorithm to identify cannabis home delivery retailers serving every block group centroid in California. This approach is a potential scalable solution to the challenges of monitoring fast-growing business in cannabis home delivery. However, there are several unique methodological issues that will require verification research and development of methodological standards. Our measure of availability of cannabis home delivery must be validated before the results can be acted on. Acknowledging important data limitations detailed below, a cautious interpretation of the results suggests that cannabis home delivery is widespread in California. Although the vast majority of block groups had no brick-and-mortar cannabis outlets, virtually all had reported access to at least one home delivery retailer. Weedmaps listings included some apparent duplication, and retailers could have over promised on where they deliver. In addition, illegal brick-and-mortar cannabis outlets are prevalent in California , and Weedmaps primarily captures legal retailers . Even so, the findings suggest that physical availability of legal retail cannabis may be far greater than previously understood based on brick-and-mortar outlets alone . Widespread availability of legal cannabis delivery also undercuts current efforts by 74% of California cities and counties to ban cannabis retailers by disallowing them from siting within their borders . Further, the methods proposed here can be applied to states where illegal retailers are rare. Thus, prior research assuming that delivery is unlikely to contribute to block group–level variation in cannabis availability may need to be reconsidered . Several practical challenges must be addressed before a full-scale validation of our approach is warranted.