Social Isolation From Agemates Among Nursery School Children

Abstract

IN EVERY group of preschool children at play one can observe considerable individual variation in the amount of interaction with others. However, a few children seem to fall outside this range of expected variation; they stand out because of the paucity of their social contacts. The focus of this study was on preschool children who rarely interact with peers (i.e. who are socially isolated from peers) but who are considered to fall within a normal range of intelligence and emotional stability. These children are of interest in their own right. In addition the fact that they fall within a normal range of intelligence and emotional stability allows for a focus upon what factorsother than basic skills in thinking and communicating-are required for the development of early peer relations.The central aims of this study were to describe how isolates as compared to non-isolates behave during nursery school free play sessions, how they are treated by peers and teachers, and how isolates and non-isolates react to changes in group size and structure. The goal of describing social isolates was adopted in part because there have been very few descriptive studies of infrequently interacting preschoolers and because isolates were thought to have been characterized in the literature in global and sometimes misleading ways. Terms such as shy, apathetic, withdrawn, passive, immature and dependent have been used to describe such children but without adequately specifying their behavioral referents. Although all of these terms may apply to social isolates, the terms are at such a high level of abstraction as to imply a wide variety of possible behaviors and behavior patterns, many of which may not be typical or representative of socially isolated young children. Also, describing the behavior and treatment of isolates was intended to contribute to a description base necessary for eventually accounting for social isolation from peers.The comparison of isolates and non-isolates was intended in part to specify the relation (if any) between the way young children behave towards peers and the way they are treated by peers. In the literature, the few descriptive studies of preschoolers' social behavior do not provide a consistent picture of how behavior patterns relate or fail to relate to peer •sociability. For example. Beaver (1932) found no relation between the character of preschoolers' treatment of peers and treatment by peers whereas Kohn (1966) found that ", . .the child gets what he puts out" *Reprint requests and requests for scoring manuals to: W, (

A cognitive-social learning approach to social skill training with low-status preschool children.

“…First, because the intervention was based on the assumption that children with low sociometric status lack requisite social skills for peer acceptance, the curriculum consisted of four specific verbal communication skills, each of which has been shown to forecast children's social acceptance in preschool groups. Each of these skills and their corresponding definitions and empirical referents can be summarized as follows: leading, offering positive play suggestions or directions to peers (Scarlett, 1980), asking questions of peers (White & Watt, 1973); supporting, making explicitly positive statements, helping, or showing affection to peers (Eisenberg et al, 1981); and commenting, making statements to peers about an ongoing activity. Furthermore, like several previous coaching studies (Bierman & Furman, 1984; Ladd, 1981), children qualified for intervention if they could be categorized as having low sociometric status and also exhibited low levels of the targeted social skills in classroom interaction with peers.…”

Developments in the Assessment of Social Skills and Social Competence in Children

“…Naturalistic situations provide the best indication of how a person usually behaves, assuming the observer's presence does not cause a change in behaviour. Several methods of observing and coding child behaviour in naturalistic settings have been developed (e.g., Furman & Masters, 1980;Scarlett, 1980). These methods typically require considerable training and practice on the part of the observer before adequate levels of inter-observer reliability can be achieved.…”

Some missed opportunities in theories of play

“…This same variation in play mechanisms widens if the extremes of human functioning are considered. For instance, it appears that socially isolated and autistic children rarely engage in nonliteral or sociodramatic play, keeping to the diversive handling of object-play, instead (Rimland 1964;Scarlett 1980). Finally, as Smith notes, it is important to acknowledge that fantasy play has a highly ludic or assimilative side.…”