CE25-021 - Implementation and Impact of School Cellphone Policy on School and Community Violence in Michigan

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Social media (SM) use is associated with disengagement from school and poor mental health, and can facilitate inter-personal and community violence, including cyber-bullying which is highest among LGBTQ+ adolescents (25%) and female (21%) students. Digital apps have been used to document and share recordings of fights, create escalation of conflicts, and be used to create direct and indirect threats. Given these negative impacts, a number of school districts across the country have implemented policies that monitor, restrict, or ban cellphone use in schools. Policies vary greatly both in their objectives and enforcement. Despite the ubiquity of such policies, there are no studies that explore how effective cellphone bans are at reducing school- and community-based violence let alone their potential unintended consequences such as limiting the ability of students to report concerns about themselves or others. The proposed project will examine school cellphone policies in Michigan using a mixed method approach to assess both implementation and impact, with a particular focus on how such policies differentially impact communities of color across the state. This research falls under CDC Research Objective #1 (effectiveness research to evaluate innovative approaches for reducing community violence) and has direct policy implications for districts in Michigan and across the country seeking to restrict school cellphone use. Using a combination of interview, survey, and administrative data sources, researchers will describe state-level variability in district student cellphone policies, understand the barriers to and facilitators of implementation and estimate their impact on indicators of community violence, including fights in school, school discipline, and police incidents. The impact analysis will utilize several quasi-experimental methods including difference-in-difference and comparative interrupted time designs to estimate causal impacts of the policy. Leveraging rich administrative data on school- and community-based violence along with youth demographics and community characteristics from the Michigan Department of Education and the Michigan State Police will allow researchers to control for a variety of potentially confounding factors and study critical outcomes at the school level. Importantly, access to this type of individual-level outcome data will allow the researchers to convincingly assess if and how cellphone policies differentially affect racial/ethnic groups and other important subgroups (e.g., urban, suburban and rural schools). Moreover, this data will allow us to study how the cellphone policies impact mental health and academic outcomes and examine whether these effects mediate impacts on violence.