The importance of peer relatedness at school for affective well‐being in children: Between‐ and within‐person associations

Abstract

Two intensive longitudinal studies examining the association between children's feeling of relatedness to peers at school and their affective well-being were performed. In Study 1, 110 third and fourth graders reported on their positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) 4 times daily and on their peer relatedness once a day over 4 weeks. Multilevel analyses revealed that children who reported higher peer relatedness on average also reported higher PA and lower NA (between-person associations). Moreover, on days when children reported higher peer relatedness than usual, they also reported higher PA, but they did not necessarily report lower NA (within-person associations). In Study 2, 55 fourth, fifth, and sixth graders indicated their PA, NA, and peer relatedness once a day over 2 weeks. We replicated the findings of Study 1 on both levels. The studies showed that feeling related to peers is associated with high PA at school and at home on a daily basis, illustrating the function of peer relatedness in promoting positive well-being. The findings further demonstrated the necessity of intensive longitudinal studies focusing on within-person associationsThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri butio n-NonCo mmercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Evaluating sociometer theory in children’s everyday lives: Inclusion, but not exclusion by peers at school is related to within-day change in self-esteem

“…as related research has found such differential effects between social inclusion and exclusion with positive and negative affect, for instance (Bartholomew et al, 2011;Schmidt et al, 2019;Schmidt, Neubauer, et al, 2020). Identifying different antecedents of a positive and a negative side of self-evaluations would demonstrate the necessity to distinguish two factors, as suggested by Huang and Dong (2012).…”

“…Daily social inclusion and exclusion were operationalized as the mean response across the four items, respectively. The items were used in previous studies (see Schmidt et al, 2019;Schmidt, Neubauer, et al, 2020). Evidence for convergent and divergent validity of these scales can be found in these papers, demonstrating the psychometric separation of social inclusion and exclusion 3 and showing differential effects on positive and negative outcomes.…”

The Bright and the Dark Side of Peer Relationships: Differential Effects of Relatedness Satisfaction and Frustration at School on Affective Well-Being in Children’s Daily Lives

“…We hasten to add though, that comparing the present findings to the one reported by van der Kaap-Deeder et al 2017is difficult, since these authors aggregated across the three SDT needs, whereas we specifically targeted the need for relatedness only. Schmidt et al (2019) also found peer relatedness to be linked to PA, but not to NA on a within-person level. In that study, experiences of direct social exclusion or rejection were not assessed, which might explain why only effects on PA, but not NA were found.…”

The power of everyday peer relatedness in predicting subjective well-being and adjustment after secondary school transition

“…The intraclass correlations of relatedness satisfaction and frustration (.45 and .43), and the intraindividual standard deviations (0.75 and 0.95) indicated that there was a substantial amount of within-person variability in these measures during the four weeks (see also Schmidt et al, 2020a). The scales were used in previous studies (see Schmidt et al, 2019;Schmidt et al, 2020a;Schmidt et al, 2020b).…”

“…However, empirical evidence is still inconclusive on whether they differentially predict positive and negative outcomes in children and young adolescents. Studies have found relatedness satisfaction to be particularly predictive of adaptive outcomes such as positive affect (Schmidt et al, 2019), self-esteem (Schmidt et al, 2020b), and school satisfaction (Tian et al, 2018), whereas relatedness frustration was primarily associated with adverse outcomes such as negative affect (Schmidt et al, 2020a), maladjustment (Rodríguez-Meirinhos et al, 2020), or internalizing problems (Vandenkerckhove et al, 2019). However, other studies demonstrate global rather than differential effects: Earl et al (2019) found relatedness satisfaction to positively predict positive affect as well as vitality and to be negatively related to negative affect, while Bartholomew et al (2011) found relatedness satisfaction and frustration to both significantly predict vitality and exhaustion in the expected directions.…”