The authors used data from seven schools in a metropolitan region to explore continuity and change in adolescent cultures and status structures; they identified six major types of status structures and explained variation among them in terms of characteristics of communities and schools. A key feature of the study is comparison of school climates, using both survey data and qualitative case studies that provide an interpretive context for the survey responses; this methodology allows a contextual level of analysis that is unavailable in either single-school ethnographies or large data sets that aggregate responses from individuals situated in many schools.