Who Is Most at Risk for School Removal? A Multilevel Discrete-Time Survival Analysis of Individual- and Context-Level Influences

The focus of this study was to prospectively investigate the effect of aggressive behavior and of classroom behavioral context, as measured in the fall of 1st grade, on the timing of 1st school removal across Grades 1-7 in a sample of predominately urban minority youths from Baltimore, Maryland. Using a multilevel discrete-time survival framework, we found that demographic characteristics of the students as well as early individual- and classroom-level of aggression contribute to the onset of school removal. Although early individual aggression was positively associated with the risk of school removal, initially higher levels of classroom aggression corresponded to lower risk of school removal.