Pages from a sociometric notebook: An analysis of nomination and rating scale measures of acceptance, rejection, and social preference

Abstract

Sociometry has had a prominent place in the research literature on children's social development. It has been used widely in the study of peer relations as both a technique for measuring the positive and negative forces among children and as a conceptual scheme for understanding the basic processes of the peer system. Beginning with Moreno's landmark publications (for example, Moreno, 1934), sociometry has been used by social developmentalists interested in peer relations as a powerful empirical and conceptual tool. In spite of sociometry's rich conceptual and methodological heritage, however, some issues regarding the use of sociometric measures remain unresolved and, in some cases, unexamined.In this chapter we address two of these unresolved issues: (1) how the two sociometric constructs-acceptance and rejection-are related to each other and to other sociometric constructs and ( 2 ) whether nomination and rating scale measures index the same constructs. The main focus of the second issue concerns which sociometric construct is measured by the mean received liking-disliking rating measure. These issues are fundamental to the study of children's experience within the peer group in that they involve the nature of sociometric constructs and the techniques by which these constructs are measured.

Developmental Risk Associated With Mutual Dislike in Elementary School Children

“…Certainly, ratings ensure that all participating classmates are considered, whereas nominations depend to a greater extent on children's ability to remember and identify classmates who are most salient for liking and disliking. Although ratings are often used to derive a mean score reflecting the average level of acceptance by peers, the end points can be validly used as equivalents to liked-most and liked-least nominations (Bukowski, Sippola, Hoza, and Newcomb, 2000). Using the lowest rating of likability ("not at all") as a means to identify mutual dislike would have the advantage of providing the opportunity for more than three mutual dislike relationships.…”

Social Status Among Peers: From Sociometric Attraction to Peer Acceptance to Perceived Popularity

“…However, research in the 1960s and 1970s showed that they were only modestly (negatively) correlated or orthogonal and were associated with different behaviors (see Hymel et al, 2002 ), laying the foundation for classifi cation schemes that treated acceptance and rejection as separate dimensions able to distinguish accepted, rejected, neglected, and controversial children (e.g., Coie et al, 1982 ;Gronlund, 1959 ;Maassen et al, 1997Maassen et al, , 2000. Subsequently, Bukowski, Sippola, Hoza, and Newcomb (2000) showed that the relationship between acceptance and rejection is both linear (and negative) and curvilinear. Thus, children who are highly accepted are typically low in rejection, although poorly accepted children may vary in their level of rejection.…”

New Participant Role Scales: comparison between various criteria for assigning roles and indications for their validity

“…The concepts ''acceptance'' and ''rejection'', traditionally regarded as separate dimensions [e.g. Bukowski et al, 2000], come into play at group level. A computer program is available to split the rating scale into two halves and to calculate the sums of the ratings on the positive and negative halves.…”