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

Abstract

Secondary school transition represents a challenging life event. This study examines108 children in Germany during the first 12 weeks of adapting to the new school. Daily satisfaction and frustration of the basic need for relatedness were examined aspredictors of subjective well-/ill-being and adjustment/psychopathology. Subjectivewell-/ill-being were assessed at Weeks 3-4 and Week 11 of the school year. In between, there was a 4-week period of daily assessments of perceived relatednesssatisfaction and frustration. Teachers indicated each child’s psychologicaladjustment/psychopathology (e.g., emotional symptoms) in Weeks 11-12. Daily relatedness satisfaction was associated with increases in positive affect from Weeks 3-4 to Week 11, while daily relatedness frustration was linked to an increase in negative affect and school anxiety. Furthermore, daily relatedness satisfaction was negatively linked to teacher-reported emotional symptoms and peer problems at Weeks 11-12, and daily relatedness frustration was positively associated with teacher-reported conduct problems and hyperactivity-inattention.

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

“…In our studies, we used positively worded items to measure self-esteem and we found significant associations with positive peer experiences. Future studies should examine whether negative peer experiences might be linked to a negative side of self-esteem that was not assessed in the present studies, 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, 2019Schmidt et al, , 2020aSchmidt et al, , 2020b. 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, 2019Schmidt et al, , 2020aSchmidt et al, , 2020b. 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.…”

“…Data of the three samples presented in this work have also been used in Schmidt et al (2020b), who investigated betweenand within-person associations among social inclusion/exclusion and positive affect and negative affect. Schmidt et al (2020a) used the sample presented as Study 3 in the current work to longitudinally predict affective well-being, school-related wellbeing, and psychological (mal-)adjustment by aggregates of everyday social inclusion/exclusion. 2…”