Beyond the Dyad: A Social-Ecological Model of Context-Based Disparities in School Discipline

• Applicant: Dr. Iniobong Essien
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 576033594

Racialized disparities in school discipline are an important source of educational inequality: students from stigmatized racialized groups are sanctioned more often and more severely, even for identical infractions. Prior psychological work has mostly treated discipline as a dyadic event between a single teacher and a single student, overlooking that judgments occur in classrooms in the presence of many students and in schools embedded in segregated, reputation laden neighborhoods. The project tests and refines a context based discrimination model explaining how structural features of educational environments—classroom, school, and neighborhood composition—shape teachers’ perceptions and disciplinary decisions. In our model, context based discrimination is best understood as differences in absolute rates of discipline across settings that vary in racialized composition, even when within classroom discipline gaps are small. The model is formulated in four linked propositions: (1) classrooms with many students from stigmatized racialized groups make racialized categories chronically accessible; (2) accessibility facilitates stereotype activation and application; (3) space-focused stereotypes tied to school and neighborhood prime expectations; and (4) these psychological processes affect discipline rates between classroom contexts. Seven work packages test the model across methods, levels, and countries. WP1 provides the first meta analysis of composition-discipline links. WP2 estimates composition effects in secondary datasets to assess generalizability. WP3 codes and analyzes a large corpus of classroom videos to reveal how differences in absolute rates of discipline emerge from classroom dynamics and in what ways they manifest in teacher behavior (WP3). WP4 conducts qualitative interviews to explore how teachers spontaneously reference social categories in different classroom contexts. WP5 fields an experience sampling study to capture day to day category accessibility. WP6 conducts causal tests based on a narrative game replication and scenario-based experiments manipulating classroom share, school reputation, neighborhood cues, and intersections with SES and gender. The final work package (WP7) synthesizes findings, refines, and more narrowly specifies our model to consolidate earlier theoretical assumptions with empirical realities. By moving research on school discipline beyond the dyad to the nested ecologies around classrooms, the project aims to link segregation to everyday cognition and disciplinary practice, and establishes when and how composition effects emerge.

• DFG Programme: Emmy Noether Independent Research Groups