How can we strengthen students’ social relations in order to reduce school dropout? An intervention development study within four Danish vocational schools

This article describes and discusses the rationale and contents of an intervention aimed at improving students’ social relations in order to reduce dropout from vocational schools as well as to achieve positive effects on students’ smoking and drug use. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork within four vocational schools in Denmark and, taking inspiration from the theoretical concept of ‘social participation’ [1, 2], seeks to identify concrete opportunities for intervention that may strengthen students’ participation and relationships within the school setting.

In Denmark, only half the students enrolled in vocational training complete the program, and 40 % of those who drop out do not continue in any educational program within 10 years [3‐5]. Compared with their peers in general upper-secondary school (both equivalent to the high school level), students attending vocational schools in Denmark have a greater risk of developing harmful patterns of tobacco, alcohol, and drug use [6, 7]. Gaining insight into the underlying causes is therefore important in order to prevent social marginalization and promote health and well-being among this particular group of students.

In relation to dropout, previous research has shown that relationships between students, relationships between students and teachers and the organizational setting of school life are important factors determining whether students complete educational programs. These studies indicate that developing positive social relations can be an incentive for students to attend school. This applies even to students who report that schoolwork is difficult and the demands are hard to meet [8‐12]. The more students interact—not only with each other but also with teachers—the more likely they are to stay, especially in difficult periods of life when students have an imminent risk of dropping out [11]. Quite clearly, students stay in school when social relations with their teachers are positive. This association persists even when students’ background, school demographics and school sector are taken into account [6]. Thomas [13] emphasizes that the beneficial effects of staying in school must outweigh those of dropping out of school. Moreover, Tanggaard [14] and Thomas [13] emphasize students’ need for a sense of belonging as an important factor for remaining in school. Part of this sense of belonging seems to come from the certainty in one’s future based on having a supportive social network.

Although developing positive social relationships among students and teachers seems to be a protective factor against dropout, most research on school dropout has focused on students’ behaviour and performance in school. Little attention has been given to the influence of the schools themselves—their organization, management and teachers—on students’ decisions to drop out [15]. Beekhoven and Dekkers [16] argue that it is time to stop focusing on individual students and their backgrounds in relation to the causes of dropout and start looking at the schools themselves. Beekhoven and Dekkers [16] claim that the role of schools in pushing students out is underestimated. Both qualitative and quantitative studies report lack of social support by teachers as an important reason for dropping out: unengaged students say that teachers do not care about them, are not interested in how well they do and are not willing to help them with problems [8, 17‐20]. Researchers thus indicate that how school life is organized, including the governance, curricula and educational methods, influences the completion of educational programs and students’ experiences of success in school participation [13, 16]. In addition, research [21‐23] has shown that a school culture that is appropriate for students as young adults and an organization that is flexible and supportive help to re-engage students [24].

In relation to well-being and health behaviour, substantial evidence indicates that peers are an important social factor [25]. Some researchers pinpoint participation in peer groups as a major factor explaining substance use [26]. However, the relationship between social networks at school and young people’s substance use is complex. Substance use plays a role in becoming socially integrated [27, 28]. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that students often use substance use as a coping mechanism if they feel marginalized [29]. Lynskey and Hall also report that using such substances as alcohol, cannabis and other drugs influences whether students complete educational programs or drop out [30].

In Denmark, research [31‐33] has shown that substance use plays a crucial role in forming peer relationships. Alcohol use is widespread and is, among other things, used to reinforce the establishment of social relationships. Cannabis remains illegal but is still widely accepted in certain groups of young people [34, 35]. Other illegal drugs are used much less, but substance use generally serves as an important marker and maker of social identity [7, 36]. This is especially important in transitions between educational institutions, such as from lower-secondary school to upper-secondary school [37, 38] or from upper-secondary school to university [39, 40]. In these periods, young people experience intense and demanding changes in their social life, and changes in their substance use often mediate and accompany these life changes. The role of tobacco and substance use and their relationship with educational transitions have not, however, been examined in the context of vocational schools, which differ from upper-secondary schools and universities in many ways. Associations have been found between students’ substance use and lower educational aspirations, lower educational expectations and increased likelihood of dropping out of educational programs [41, 42]. Thus, it can be concluded that social integration is strongly associated with substance use, that this has implications for adolescents’ educational progress and that the school environment plays a major role in this association [41]. This is worrying, because education is inherently an important determinant of health [43].

Despite ample research evidence of the significance of social and organizational conditions for educational attainment and the well-being of young people, little is known of specific intervention programs that may be useful in vocational schools in Denmark. This article aims to describe the rationale and contents of an intervention program that was developed in order to ameliorate this knowledge gap. We begin by providing some background information about the specific setting of vocational education in Denmark. Next, we outline the theoretical rationale and the methods used in the field study. Then we present key empirical findings from this exploratory study. Finally, we present the content of the intervention program that was developed in cooperation with the management, teachers and counselors at the four schools. We conclude by presenting some more-general reflections on developing an intervention within this type of setting.

To gain insight into the vocational school context and to build knowledge about existing as well as potential possibilities for social participation in vocational schools, we adopted an exploratory method comprising qualitative interviews with students followed by ethnographic field studies at vocational schools, including informal interviews with management, teachers and counselors and additional interviews and group discussions with students. The research literature provides knowledge about dropout rates and the extent of substance use, but we had little knowledge about the specific organization of Denmark’s vocational schools and the implications for students’ social participation and educational attainment. We knew that many researchers had reported problems associated with individualization, but we wanted to more deeply understand how this challenge appeared in daily school practice, how it differed between school departments and between students’ future professions and how it might differ between students. Thus, the aim of this development work was to examine existing practices in order to identify concrete ways in which students’ social participation and relations may be strengthened.

The exploratory study was initiated in summer 2009. We conducted 22 qualitative interviews [59, 60] with students² 17–19 years old (15 boys and 7 girls) who had entered vocational education two years earlier. Fourteen of these students had continued their vocational program, four students had transferred to general upper-secondary school and four students had dropped out and were either working or unemployed. The interviews were conducted as an interactive process [61, 62] with open-ended questions, guided by an interview guide. These interviews dealt with the students’ perceptions of the new school life and forms of participation and included their experiences with using tobacco and alcohol and other drugs. The interviews also dealt with the students’ participation in social life outside the school context: for instance, with whom the students associated in the evenings, where they met and what they did. Thus, the empirical material provided students’ specific descriptions of their participation in the new school setting and their everyday life. As these exploratory interviews provided a preliminary insight into associations between students’ social relations and their drug use only [35, 63, 64], we chose to explore the issue further through ethnographic fieldwork. This field study was carried out in order to provide more-specific insight into particular vocational school organizations and students’ participation, including development of social relations and students’ well-being as well as drug use leading to drop out.

From January to June 2010, three of the authors, two anthropologists and a psychologist, conducted ethnographic fieldwork at four vocational schools. The four schools are located in major towns dispersed in Denmark and offer a wide variety of education programs. The schools were chosen for participation through convenience sampling [62]. Colleagues in the municipalities where the schools are located established our contact at two schools. One of these schools established contact at a third school by recommendation, and a fourth school called and offered to participate in the study. However, in order to strengthen the generalizability of the findings, we pursued a maximum variation strategy [62] within the sampled schools by including participant observations in various educational programs (carpenters, bricklayers, painters, electricians, mechanics, cooks, graphic designers, and sign writers). The fieldwork was designed as an exploratory field study in a broad ethnographic sense and included 40 days of participant observations [65‐67] with an equal distribution between the four schools and an equal distribution between new program starts and everyday practices. The included educational programs represent various professional traditions, teaching curricula, educational program length and ways of organizing the learning environment, as well as teachers and students with specific—but sometimes very different—interests related to their profession. The theoretical concept of participation guided the observations, as well as the following qualitative interviews. Thus, the focus in observations and interviews was what the students participated in, how they participated, with whom they participated, where they participated and for what personal reasons and following which interests and personal orientations they participated [1, 2]. More specifically, the participant observations focused on the professional practices at the schools as well as the students’ social interaction and their participation in social activities in the school. The participant observations also included a focus on the students’ conditions for school participation and the organization of specific professional practices, physical arrangements, routines, school traditions, ideologies, social norms, professional self-perception, the schools’ demands of the students and students’ expectations for other students.

We took field notes while present in the field. The notes captured what was said, what happened, the atmosphere, descriptions of contexts and places, specific activities, the persons present and what they were doing. The notes were afterwards written into expanded notes (300 pages). These notes varied from small notes to thick descriptions [68]. Informal conversations with students (ranging from 16 years old to middle-aged) took place daily as part of the participant observations. These conversations dealt with the students’ perceptions of their participation within the school setting as well as outside the school and included their use of tobacco and alcohol and other drugs. These informal conversations were followed by four additional in-depth qualitative interviews with individual students and four group interviews with two to three students 16–25 years old in each group. These interviews and group discussions were conducted to explore certain incidents, reactions and questions that had occurred during the participant observation period. All interviews were transcribed word for word.

According to Bartholomew [69], researchers must involve practitioners, who shall later implement the intervention, in the preparation phase.³ The participant observations were therefore followed by informal conversations and several discussion meetings with managers, teachers and educational guidance counselors. These discussions focused on their assumptions about students’ attendance and dropout, social and mental health problems and problems with the use of tobacco and alcohol and other drugs. In addition, the discussions concerned the school staff’s conceptions of the needs and expectations of the young people attending their schools and considerations about whether the organization of school practices and curricula generally met and supported the students’ expectations and specific needs.

Profoundly knowing the specific context of vocational schools is a prerequisite for developing an intervention within this setting. The collaboration with the school management and staff continued into the more specific planning of the intervention program. This continual collaboration with the actors in the field was a precondition for developing an intervention program sensitive to the distinctive and complex school practices of vocational schools, as other studies [70‐72] have shown. Including the students in this part of developing the intervention program would have been highly relevant. However, according to the school management, the short duration of the basic courses made the students’ participation impossible as this would have conflicted with the students’ focus on the curriculum and their acquisition of professional skills.

We presented preliminary outlines of our analysis to the school staff at several meetings at each of the four schools. The intervention program was planned to be a tool for management and teachers, and involving them and giving them the opportunity to put their fingerprint on the suggested intervention was of utmost importance. Based on the feedback we received at these discussion meetings, we reformulated the program to match the specific conditions within the field. Thus, dialogue between practitioners and researchers determined not only the findings of the exploratory fieldwork, including our knowledge about the students’ perspectives on their new school life, but also the development of the intervention program.

The material from interviews and fieldwork was first coded in NVivo, adopting an inductive approach and basic principles of cross-sectional indexing as described by Mason [73]. Through an iterative process, in which theories of social practice and participation served to guide our readings of the data, we developed the codes and categories into seven overarching themes, which we use to structure our presentation of results.

In line with earlier work in this field [8‐10], our study suggests that the reasons for dropping out of vocational education are numerous and complex. Some students drop out because of social and personal difficulties that result in a general lack of well-being. Some students drop out because their school performance is poor or because they perceive their future prospects as poor whether or not they finish their educational program. Some students give priority to time spent with friends centring on cigarette smoking and, for some students, cannabis. Some students drop out because they are bored, although they are doing well in school. Some students drop out because they are not able to get an apprenticeship agreement when they pass their basic course examination. There is no “typical” dropout, as Rumberger [15] states. In his review of issues and evidence related to dropout, he emphasizes that understanding the causes of dropout is complex. Dropping out of school might be viewed as a process of disengagement from school, perhaps for either social or academic reasons, which culminates in the final act of leaving. Developing a basic understanding of these school processes before developing an intervention program is therefore important [15, 76].

In this study we adopted a theoretical approach which stresses the importance of participation in communities of social practice [50]. This approach guided our observations in the field and served as an important source of inspiration when designing the intervention. Our experience was that our theoretical concepts and ideas resonated well with the experiences of school staff members as well as students. To our knowledge, no prior studies have adopted this particular theoretical approach in public health intervention research, but our study suggests that it can be a useful framework for intervention development.

Our study shows that reducing student dropout calls for a multifaceted intervention program, including both new initiatives and changes at the organizational level and regarding teachers’ practices. The intervention thus aims to shape the conditions for the students’ development of social relations by reshaping the school structure regarding their participation in vocational school life. The basic idea is to integrate the development of positive social relationships with learning and training. As shown, this requires changing many practices in everyday vocational school life. Students’ experiences of positive social relationships promote general well-being within the school context and might lead to positive focus on school. In the longer term, improving social relations might influence the students’ completion of the educational programs and reduce the use of tobacco and harmful substances, improving general well-being and health.

However, this intervention program also presents challenges. The program is meant to improve how the teachers welcome new students, to enable greater integration of social and educational activities and to enhance the capacity of teachers and counselors to deal with problems related to the use of alcohol and other drugs among the students. These suggestions may be incorporated into the everyday practices at the various departments in many ways and call for an intervention program that enables flexibility for practitioners. In addition, an intervention can only be socially effective if it succeeds in creating a shared understanding between researchers and practitioners that enables the intervention to become implemented under ever-shifting social circumstances. Rod et al. [77] propose that the term “the spirit of the intervention” be used as an entry point for discussing the dimensions of an intervention that make it socially effective. We also propose that thinking of the intervention program as a set of principles that may be applied in the daily practices of the teachers can guide this discussion with the practitioners [77].

Future research will address the actual implementation of the intervention program and examine its effectiveness. Our findings indicate that a strong potential exists for strengthening students’ social participation and relationships in the context of vocational schools.