Reciprocal Peer Dislike and Psychosocial Adjustment in Childhood

Abstract

Reciprocal peer dislike was examined as a predictor of school adjustment and social relationship quality. One hundred and fifty one (69 male and 74 female, Mage = 9.53, SDage = 1.87 years) children completed measures of school liking, loneliness, and friendship quality twice over three months. From ratings of the amount of time participants liked to spend with individual classmates, social network analyses were used to determine reciprocal peer dislike.Curvilinear regression analyses revealed that reciprocal peer dislike at Time 1 predicted changes in the children's loneliness and friendship quality assessed as help, security, and closeness over three months. The findings support the conclusion that reciprocal peer dislike predicts aspects of school adjustment and social relationship qualities.

Adolescents’ Experiences of Victimization: The Role of Attribution Style and Generalized Trust

“…As the four items directly assessed loneliness at school they represented a measure of 'pure' loneliness and were used in the current study because there are only limited ways of asking an individual if they experience loneliness (Galanaki & Kalantzi-Azizi, 1999). Similar measures of 'pure' loneliness have been used previously with children and demonstrated appropriate psychometric properties (e.g., Betts & Stiller, 2014;Ladd & Coleman, 1997). The items (e.g., "I feel alone at school"), demonstrated good internal consistency (α = .86) School liking.…”

Narrative skills predict peer adjustment across elementary school years

“…Research has shown that peer disliking is associated with a host of negative behavioral antecedents such as deficits in social information processing and inappropriate social approaches to peers, and aggressive behavior (Bierman, ; Crick & Dodge, ; Dodge, ). Disliking is linked to perceptions of loneliness, to self‐, peer‐, and teacher assessments of being left out or excluded by others, and to declining classroom participation and school avoidance (Betts & Stiller, ; Bierman, ; Buhs, Ladd, & Herald, ; Serdiouk, Rodkin, Madill, Logis, & Gest, ); thus, the impact of peer disliking is far reaching.…”

Status and Negative Ties: A Longitudinal Network Study among Adolescents = Státusz és negatív kapcsolatok: Egy longitudinális hálózatelemzés középiskolások körében

“…Those who are seen high status members in the school are more likely to study well and feeling goof at school. Particularly, lack of understanding and negative peer influence are crucially important as they are related to severe individual outcomes such as low satisfaction, aggression, low performance and stress (Card, 2010;Betts & Stiller, 2014). The implication of the results is that individuals' own status attributions are not always consistent with how individuals think of the status order in their own community.…”

“…hostility) (Allen et al, 2005). By contrast, having low status could cause severe problems such as bad mood, stress, low school achievement and high stress (Card, 2010;Betts & Stiller, 2014). Unpopular or unaccepted peers are at a greater risk to difficulties in later life points (Parker & Asher, 1987), and are likely to externalize problems and drop out from school (Laird, Jordan, Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 2001).…”

“…Disliking relations have a negative influence on adolescents in a number of ways: they are often associated with externalizing and internalizing problems, lower prosocial behavior, fewer friendship relations, victimization, and rejection by peers (Card, 2010). In addition, disliking relationships strongly influence school adjustment and achievement (Betts & Stiller, 2014;Buhs, Ladd, & Herald, 2006). Furthermore, if one youth dislikes another, then open conflict or aggression between them becomes more likely, especially if the disliking is mutual (Abecassis et al, 2002;Erath, 2009;Pope, 2003;Witkow, Bellmore, Nishina, Juvonen, & Graham, 2005).…”