The Impact of First-Grade “Friendship Group” Experiences on Child Social Outcomes in the Fast Track Program

Abstract

Many interventions for children's behavior problems successfully utilize a group format for social skills training, providing opportunities for practice and performance feedback from peers. Recent studies however, suggest that grouping aggressive children together may reduce intervention effectiveness or even increase risk. The present study examined the relative impact of children's own behavior and their experiences with peers in the first-grade "friendship groups" of Fast Track, a multi-component preventive intervention program. Two-hundred sixty-six children (56% minority, 29% female) participated in 55 friendship groups. Children's own positive and negative behavior in friendship groups was related to relative improvements in social cognitive skills, prosocial behavior, and aggression, assessed through child interviews, teacher ratings, and peer sociometric nominations. Results from hierarchical linear models also revealed that the amount of peer escalation children received for their disruptive behavior during sessions impeded some intervention gains, whereas mere exposure to other children's positive or negative behavior was rarely related to outcomes.

Peer Interaction: What Causes What?

“…Discrepancies between one's self-perceptions and one's perceptions of friends are examined in relation to aggression and rejection (Prinstein & Wang, 2005) and change processes were observed in "friendship" intervention groups (Lavallee et al, 2005). But the interpersonal relationships existing between influence sources and the individuals being influenced is not dealt with in these reports.…”

Preventing Aggressive and Violent Behavior: Using Prevention Programs to Study the Role of Peer Dynamics in Maladjustment Problems

“…Lavallee and colleagues examined the extent to which individual outcomes amongst participants of the friendship groups were influenced by individual and group characteristics. Overall, they showed that the Friendship Groups achieved high levels of positive in-session behavior and that peer-escalation was typically well controlled (Lavallee et al 2005). However, consistent with the deviancy-training hypothesis, peer reinforcement of disruptive behavior was associated with less desirable outcomes in some groups.…”

“…More evidence shedding light on the social dynamics involved in group interventions comes from the study by Lavallee et al (2005) on the Friendship Groups' component of the Fast Track prevention project. This intervention involved 55 groups of 5-6 children attending first grade of primary school and being identified as belonging to the 10-15% children with the highest scores of aggressive and disruptive behavior, according to teacher and parent assessments.…”

Peer-Nominated Deviant Talk Within Residential Treatment: Individual and Group Influences on Treatment Response

“…One of our main goals was to address measurement challenges that have hampered empirical investigations of deviancy training in residential treatment (Dishion et al 1996). Research using counselor, parent, and self-reports (Lavallee et al 2005;Mager et al 2005) in communitybased treatment has been promising, but residential treatment creates special challenges, including numerous peer interactions that could undermine prosocial treatment goals and encourage deviance throughout the therapeutic day rather than just in a therapy group. This led us to test a different approach that asked youth to nominate peers who engaged in rule-breaking talk and showed interest in and encouragement of rule-breaking in others.…”

“…Because peer nominations are aggregated, reliable and valid indices can be obtained using relatively few items (Weiss et al 2002). Other clinical assessments of deviancy training have relied on 1-2 items, aggregated over two time points (Lavallee et al 2005) or two raters, such as clinician/observer or parent/youth to improve reliability (Leve and Chamberlain 2005;Mager et al 2005). One downside of our approach is that we were unable to measure dyadic reinforcement directly.…”