Social Interaction, Social Competence, and Friendship in Children

Abstract

The relationship between social skills, social interaction, and popularity was examined. The subjects were 198 children in third and fourth grades in middle- and low-income schools. The relationships between number of friends, socioeconomic status, and grade level were studied in a 2 times 2 times 2 factorial design with 2 sets of dependent measures: (1) social skills were assessed by an experimenter testing each child individually on a set of tasks which included measures of the ability to label emotions in facial expressions, knowledge of how to make friends, giving help, and role-taking ability; and (2) social interaction in the classroom was assessed using a naturalistic observational system. Popular and unpopular children differed in their knowledge of how to make friends and on the referential-communication task. In the classroom, popular children distributed and received more positive reinforcement than unpopular children and spent less time daydreaming. Both grade and social class factors were significant. However, different patterns of results contributed to the main effect of friends and the grade-level main effect. The importance of assessing social skills which are first validated by reference to a criterion such as sociometric position was noted.

Las estrategias de entrada en grupo en niños de primero de educación primaria.

“…Una larga tradición de este tipo de investigaciones indican que los niños populares son más amistosos y constructivos en las interacciones con los iguales (e.g., Dodge, 1980;Goldman, Corsini y Urioste, 1980;Gottman, Gonso y Rasmussen, 1975;Marshall y McCandless, 1957). Los datos analizados no muestran diferencias significativas en función del tipo sociométrico, es decir, que para entrar en un grupo de iguales, los niños rechazados y promedios utilizan mayoritariamente estrategias competentes (91,5 % promedios y 82,1 % rechazados).…”

Judging and estimating other people’s value: from judgment biases to social competence

“…Enfin, la majorité des chercheurs évaluent les compétences sociales à partir des jugements de l'entourage social, soit sous la forme de mesures sociométriques classiques (expressions d'affection ou de rejet, choix de parte naire, mesures de popularité) ou d'échelles plus spécifiques (qui dans le groupe coopère le plus, est bon camarade, menace les autres ou initie les conflits ; voir, e.g. Feldman et al, 1990;Gottman et al, 1975;Green et al, 1980;Wentzel, 1991bWentzel, , 1993Wentzel & Cadwell, 1997). Ainsi, dans la plupart des recherches, la compétence sociale est inférée à partir des jugements de sympathie ou d'approbation sociale : conçue comme la capacité à engendrer des jugements favorables, la question des compétences sociales correspond bien, en miroir, à celle du jugement social selon que l'on aborde la question prioritairement sous l'angle de la source ou sous l'angle de la cible du jugement.…”

Social skills training with young adolescents: group and individual approaches in a school setting

“…Beck and Forehand (1984) report that friendly behaviour towards peers (Hartup et al, 1967) is characteristic of children with high sociometric status while children with low status are likely to have limited knowledge of how to make friends and to be poor in communication skills (Gottman et al, 1975). Consequently children lacking in these respects may require help.…”

“…Thirdly there are underlying processes which may be co gnitive or motivational in nature. Gottman et al (1975) found that low status children were less knowled g eable about how to make a friend than more popular peers.…”

“…Conger and Keane (1981) comment that "Some investigations (O'Connor, 1972) have conceptualised social skills deficits in terms of social isolation as a function of withdrawal, whereas others (Gottman et al, 1975) Tiffen and Spence (1986) gave the same social skills training programme to "rejected" and "neglected" (or isolated) children, in an effort to identify the group benefiting most from the procedure. In the event, however, neither group was significantly improved by treatment.…”