Theory of mind and peer cooperation in two play contexts

Making sense of social pretense: The effect of the dyad, sex, and language ability in a large observational study of children’s behaviors in a social pretend play context

“…The relative importance of interactional contexts and individual differences could be established via carefully designed studies investigating contrasts in performance between play and non‐play activities, as well as contrasts between solitary play and play with peers of different levels of competence. In addition, using statistical techniques such as Actor‐Partner Interdependence Modeling, future research could establish the explicit role of both individual and partner characteristics in shaping play behaviors (e.g., Etel & Slaughter, ).…”

“…Despite the clear non‐independence of data elicited from paired interactions, to the best of our knowledge, few studies have explicitly modeled the influence of partner behaviors between peers in the context of dyadic play. One very recent notable exception is the work by Etel and Slaughter () who found that coordination and communication during play were highly non‐independent in dyadic play (intra‐class correlations between .48 and .90). It is possible that a lack of consideration of the interaction of the dyad during play underlies the inconsistencies in the literature to date, and furthermore, failing to account for partner behavior is likely to obstruct any attempts to characterize how child‐level characteristics contribute to social pretend play behaviors (or vice versa).…”

Dispositional playfulness in young children: A cross-sectional and longitudinal examination of the psychometric properties of a new child self-reported playfulness scale and associations with social behaviour

“…Almost three decades ago Barnett (1990) suggested that 'empirical attention should be focused on the playful child, rather than the child at play ' (p.320). This assertion is supported by recent work employing sophisticated analytic approaches that have demonstrated the overwhelming role of context, speci cally play partner, in determining children's observed behaviours in play rather than the intuitive assumption that children's own cognitive skills, such as language or perspective taking abilities shape their play behaviours (Etel & Slaughter, 2019;Youngblade & Dunn, 1995;Gibson, et al, in press). This suggests that a focus on children's tendency toward playfulness may be a fruitful avenue of research and complement research focused on children's observed play behaviours.…”

Making sense of social pretence: The role of the dyad, sex and language ability in a large observational study of children’s behaviours in a social pretend play context

“…Despite the clear nonindependence of data elicited from paired interactions, to the best of our knowledge, few studies has explicitly modelled the in uence of partner behaviour between peers in the context of dyadic play. One very recent notable exception is the work by Etel and Slaughter (2019) who found that coordination and communication during play were highly non-independent in dyadic play (ICCs between .48 and .90). It is possible that a lack of consideration of the interaction of the dyad during play underlies the inconsistencies in the literature to date, and furthermore, failing to account for partner behaviour is likely to obstruct any attempts to characterise how child-level characteristics contribute to social pretend play behaviours (or vice-versa).…”