DO FRIENDS of the opposite gender distract teenagers, hampering their academic performance? It may seem obvious, at least to paranoid parents, and yet it is hard to prove. Simple analysis of a survey of American schoolchildren conducted in 1995, for example, suggests no link between the proportion of a girl’s friends who were boys and her grades. Boys with lots of female friends actually achieved better results than those with fewer.
A new paper* by Andrew Hill of the University of South Carolina, however, digs deeper into the data, and comes to a different result. Friendship groups are not random, which makes it tricky to isolate the effect of fraternising with the opposite sex on school performance. Pushy parents, for instance, may both encourage after-school activities (hotbeds of hobnobbing across the gender divide) and help out with homework. By the same token, the sort of boys who do not find it embarrassing to join a clique composed mainly of girls may also be more studious.
Mr Hill gets around this by looking at the proportion of schoolmates of either sex living near each student. He reasons that parents do not choose...
from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1Htop2X
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