Children's awareness of which peers like them and which peers dislike them

Abstract

The present research examined children's awareness of the specific same-sex peers who like or dislike them. Awareness was evaluated in relation to children's peer sociometric status. All children in grades one through six provided same-sex peer sociometric nominations and same-sex peer sociometric ratings to determine their sociometric status. In addition, each child indicated the nominations and ratings they believed they received from same-sex peers. Children's sociometric status was associated with their awareness of liking and disliking from peers. Rejected status children were the least accurate in their judgments of who like them and popular status children were the least accurate in their judgments of who disliked them. These findings support and extend prior research documenting that rejected status children a) demonstrate a lack of awareness of their social competence, yet b) report more loneliness than children in other status groups.

Status sociométrico e avaliação de características comportamentais: um estudo de competência social em pré-escolares

“…Os dados relativos à escolha mútua que revelaram que as meninas superaram os meninos neste aspecto são compatíveis com a maior facilidade de integração social no gênero feminino: indubitavelmente, há maior facilidade na interação quando existe reciprocidade e correspondência de afetos. Ainda no que diz respeito às escolhas mútuas e coerentemente com a hipótese de que as crianças populares são mais conscientes de sua própria competência social (MacDonald & Cohen, 1995), as crianças do grupo popular apresentaram maior reciprocidade nas escolhas mútuas positivas que os demais grupos.…”

False Consensus and Adolescent Peer Contagion: Examining Discrepancies between Perceptions and Actual Reported Levels of Friends’ Deviant and Health Risk Behaviors

“…Research on hostile attribution biases has demonstrated that rejected and aggressive youth are especially prone to misattribute benign social cues as due to hostile intent (e.g., Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1990). Zakriski and Coie (1996) revealed that rejected and aggressive youth demonstrate considerable difficulty discerning which of their peers may like or dislike them (see also MacDonald & Cohen, 1995). Research also has consistently demonstrated that these youths are prone to overestimate their own social competence and status among peers (Hughes, Cavell & Grossman, 1997;Rudolph & Clark, 2001).…”

Social consequences of academic teaming in middle school: The influence of shared course taking on peer victimization.

“…Other peer acceptance measures commonly used in the literature (e.g., “who do you like the most at school?”) also capture both established and desired associations with peers (c.f., Lease & Axelrod, 2001; MacDonald & Cohen, 1995). …”