Friendship and Social status Flashcards
Peer relations in human socialisation
Peers will in many respects have more in common with a child than his/her family members. Consequently, they will influence a child’s behaviour by:
- Modelling behaviours that a child can imitate
- Reinforcing (positively or negatively) a child’s behaviour
- Setting bench marks for a child to compare themselves to (affects self-esteem)
Peer Preference
Lewis et al, 1975
Touch mother more, but look more at peers – shows interest in peers
Mueller & Brenner, 1997
Interactions = just looking at another child. This low level of peer interaction is probably because infants are not accomplished in social skills
Parten (1932)
5 different modes of interacting with other children:
Unoccupied – Sitting alone unconcerned with others
Onlooker – Sitting alone observing others
Parallel – Playing nearby others with same objects but interacting little
Associative – Engaging in an activity with others
Cooperative – Engaging in an activity with others toward a shared goal
The balance tends to shift toward group play as children get older (Smith, 1978).
Ellis, Rogoff & Cromer (1981). In the course of development children’s contact with peers gradually increases while with adults’ decreases. Preference for same sex friendship occur around 6-7, Until then they actually preferred mixed sex friendships.
In older children 10-11, there were distant differences between boy and girl activities and friendships – Boys play in larger mixed age groups, while girls have smaller groups or same-sex pairs (Lever, 1978).
Social Staus
Being popular is important to children
Peer status can affect children’s happiness, social development, school attendance and their future behaviour and outcomes
Clark, Wyon, & Richards (1969) observed the social interactions of all children in two classes of 20 students. Circle represent girls. Triangles represent boys. Lines exist where children were playing together 15% or more of the time. Enables to see at a glance the ‘popular’ children and those who have no friends. It also allows us to see how groups are divided by sex. It is a neat way of illustrating social structure, provided the class isn’t very big. Observations give a valid measure of who associated with whom.
Coie, Dodge and Coppotelli, 1982
Nominate 3 people they like a lot and 3 people they don’t like very much. Each child is scored according to how many people did or didn’t like them and put into one of following categories:
-Popular, Controversial, Average, Neglected, Rejected.
Hymel et al, 2002 – Reviewed techniques and discusses ethical issues (Questions about not liking someone could bring about increased negative behaviour to disliked peers – Little evidence
Factors effecting Peer status
Temperament/personality – Good interpersonal skills, not high in aggression, not withdrawn children are more popular (Newcomb et al, 1993)
Past experiences
Physical appearance: attractiveness correlates with popularity (Vaughn and Langlois, 1983)
Social skills: ability to process and act on social information
Crick & Dodge 1994
Children of different sociometric status types vary in social cognitive skills
Social skills can be envisaged as an exchange model of social information. Children have to encode information to perceive what another child is doing, interpret this, search for an appropriate response, evaluate responses and select the best and act on that decision.
-Social situation as cognitive task – too cognitive, an emotional process was intergrated (Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000)
-Models like this are helpful in conceptualizing reasons why some children are successful and others aren’t in peer relations.
Assessing Social info Processing
Dodge, Pettit, McClaskey & Brown (1986)
Task 1 Child watched videos of social interactions involving
a) peer group entry
b) peer provocation.
Were asked questions relating to each step in a social information processing model
Task 2a Child assessed on a peer group entry task:
Had to join two children who were already playing together
Task 2b Child actually provoked by a peer
Children’s ability on task 1a predicted their ability on task 2a - Shows you can talk to children to shape their interactions and predict social interactions
Children also observed in classroom (naturalistic observation)
Average = Scored well on video task, joined the group well and wasn’t aggressive when provoked.
Rejected Aggressive = Scored poorly on video task, was rated 1.5/4 by peers for joining the group, Verbal aggression to being provoked. 16% of the time in antisocial interaction (Mean = 4%)
Consequences of social status
Kupersmidt & Coie, (1990).
Compared social status and negative outcomes (Suspended, Dropout and getting involved with the police)
Rejected kids cannot develop social interaction skills and will therefore behave ineptly, unable to share and cooperate > Average > Neglected > Popular
Unpopular because of personality? Or are characteristics cause by exclusion?
-Dodge et al 1990 – set up groups of strangers 6-8 years olds and observed. Findings showed that children bring characteristics with them which causes people to react in certain ways. Rejected children tend to engage in behaviors with are not likely to bring positive reactions – aggressive, uncooperative
Aggressive rejected: poor self control, behavioural problems, disruptive
Problematic academic profiles (Wentzel and Asher, 1995)
♣Thought that they might misinterpret other’s behaviours or too readily select agg responses – however not all agg behaviour is due to lack of social skills, people can be manipulating
Nonaggressive rejected: anxious, withdrawn, socially unskilled
Hymel et al, 1990 – Developed difficulties of an internalising nature – fearful, anxious, withdrawal
Improving social skills
Sandstorm & Coie, 1999
-Looked at factors in children escaping from the rejected label over 2 years. Important factors were, perception of social status, participation in extracurricular, internal locus of control, parental monitoring. Surprisingly aggression was positively related to status improvement in boys.
Parents
- Creating opportunities for their children to interact with others. Parents can directly influence social development. They guide the child towards certain types of interactions with others - play dates. Pre-schoolers whose parents actively initiate peer contact tend to have more friends and are more likely to be accepted by their classmates compared to children whose parents do not involve them in such interactions (Ladd & Golter, 1988).
- Being a role model in social interactions themselves Kolvin et al, 1977 – Found that mothers low on sociability were more likely you have an unpopular child than social mothers.
Teachers (Ladd, 1981)
- adult coach could help children to be more accepted by teaching them 3 methods of communication:
-Asking peers positively toned questions
-Offering useful suggestions and directions to peers
-Making supportive statements to peers
Spent significantly greater percentage of time engaging in 2 of the 3 trained skills. evidenced significant and lasting gains in classroom peer acceptance. The results are interpreted as support for the intervention’s effectiveness and a social learning explanation of behavioral change.
Friendship
Many children who are unpopular do have a friend and are contented within that friendship and indeed this relationship appears to have some protective effect against low peer group acceptance (Dunn, 2004)
Exhibit 4 features – Reciprocity and intimacy, social activity, conflict resolution and effective task performance (Newcomb & Bagwell, 1995)
Being without friends is associated with less desirable developmental outcomes – emotional problems, less sociable, make fewer educational gains. However, while this puts them at risk it doesn’t mean all are affected. Some children do not seem to need friends for healthy development and causation is difficult, it may be that children with these issues are less attractive to other peers. (Schaffer, 2003)
Differences in Friendships
Howes et al, 1994
Observed 24 dyads of 4-year-olds (6 long-term friend pairs, 12 short-term friend pairs and 6 pairs of strangers)
-Report amount of engagement in different types of play as a score.
-Friends engaged in more complex levels of pretend play than strangers
-Long term friends > friends > strangers high level cooperative play
-Illustrated two of the main themes of friendship – social activity and intimacy
-Fonzi (1997) – Conflict resolution is more frequent too
Bigelow and La Gaipa (1975)
6 -14 to write essays about their expectations of best friends. Had raters score them on 16 dimensions (USA)
-Earlier ages of children - Friendship talked about things they do together, things they give them early on
-Older children talk about them in terms of belief and values/ Shared interests
-Based on story analysis Bigelow and La Gaipa (1980) propose a three stage model of friendship attitudes. – Reward cost stage, concerned with common activities and proximity (7-8 years), Normative stage, concerned with shared values (9-10 years) and Empathic stage, Understanding and shared intrests (11-12 years)
Benefits of friendship
Immediate benefits to being sociometricallly accepted and having friends – avoid loneliness, engage in more intense social activities
Hartip (1996) suggests that being popular and having close friends could be important in development. But these are not easily tested. However, evidence supports the idea that status and friendship have a wider importance, both at the time and for later development.
Field (1984) observed children leaving kindergarten, they showed increased levels of negative effect and aggressiveness. And when observing the children left behind they also showed agitated behavior – suggesting a small scale ‘grief’ response. Friendships are actively important to a child.
