ICAR Research Data Repository for Knowledge Management

This dataset contains files for the replication of "Racial Social Norms among Brazilian Students: Academic Performance, Social Status and Racial Identification".

Data comes from the project Attitudes and Relationships among Primary and High School Students. The project interviewed more than 4 thousand students in five Brazilian public schools. It contains information about the students, their beliefs, and friendship ties between them.

Paper Abstract: Studies in the United States show that minority students might face a trade-off between better academic performance and peer acceptance, the so-called ``acting white''. This paper investigates the relationship between grades and social status in five Brazilian schools and how it differs between racial groups. Social status is measured using friendship ties among students, assigning higher status to students more central in the network. The racial composition of friendship ties is diverse, although friendships tends to favor racial peers, especially for black students. We find a positive correlation between grades and social status of nonwhite students that is driven by their status among their white classmates. This differs from the pattern observed in the US, where a negative correlation between minorities' grades and their status among racial peers is not compensated by their status among white students. We also investigate how academic performance is associated with racial identity choice conditional on skin color, finding a weak negative relationship between higher grades and the odds of classification as mixed-race.