Habit formation is thought to exert great influence on behavior. It has been offered as a potential answer to questions such as importance of brand loyalty, development of obesity, consumers’ responsiveness to sugar-sweetened beverages taxes, and existence of various drug “gateway” effects. I propose a dynamic model that predicts habit forming from children’s early choices to engage in bullying in elementary school, and employ a unique data set to evaluate the relative importance of classroom management and teacher practices in mitigating persistence of this behavior as children age into early middle school. The data came from Phase 3 of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development.
Using random coefficients mixed logit model as derived from a random utility framework, children’s bullying-specific preferences are characterized as a function of multiple time-varying attributes of classroom environments and teacher practices. Children’s preferences are assumed to differ such that unobserved child-specific heterogeneity is reflected in distribution of each classroom attribute’s influence on a child’s conditional marginal utility of bullying choice. Using a time-varying panel of child, teacher, and classroom attributes, the model is able to test whether bullying or aggressive behavior is a problem of persistence (habit formation) and which classroom attributes serve as likely sources of this persistence. By allowing child-specific heterogeneity, this model is better able to obtain more realistic marginal effectiveness estimates of teacher practices that play a central role in the management and prevention of bullying within schools.
Results indicate that competence in teaching and personal caring for students are important teacher behaviors for bullying deterrence, as are practices that promote student cohesion. Teachers’ over-reliance on punitive methods of control and/or unclear rules for student behavior emerged as less effective deterrents.