Why Do Children Become Rejected by Their Peers? A Review of Studies into the Relationship Between Oral Communicative Competence and Sociometric Status in Childhood

Abstract

Being rejected by peers has devastating consequences for a child's future social-cognitive development. It is therefore important to investigate factors that contribute to childhood peer rejection. In doing so, the present review specifically focused on sociometric status, a concept that refers to a child's position within the peer group (e.g., liked or disliked). Although previous studies indicated that children's ability to communicate effectively might partly determine their sociometric status, much was still unclear about this relation. Therefore, in the present review, a total of 25 studies into the relation between children's (aged 1 to 12 years) level of oral communicative competence and their sociometric status was systematically reviewed. Results generally pointed to a significant relation between the two variables. Specifically, rejected children communicate less responsive compared with popular children. However, several gaps in previous research were identified, resulting in five recommendations for future studies. First, the complexity of the construct of oral communicative competence asks for an approach in which multiple methods are combined (i.e., mixed methods). Second, future studies should be conducted in non-western countries as well to study possible cross-cultural differences. Third, as the majority of researches were small-scale exploratory studies, future research should include larger samples in order to generalize the findings outside the sample. Fourth, future studies should adopt longitudinal and experimental designs to investigate the direction of the relation of interest. And finally, as previous research showed that the interactional context, gender, and age might influence the relation between oral communicative competence and sociometric status, future studies could take these factors into account.

Emotional Competence Mediates the Relationship between Communication Problems and Reactive Externalizing Problems in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder: A Longitudinal Study

“…The relation between language problems may be more salient in earlier ages, whereas the role of emotional competence may increase in strength as children become older. A recent review, for instance, found that the relation between language abilities and social problems with peers diminished as children became older [68]. Alternatively, it is possible that emotional competence already mediates the relation between language problems and externalizing problems from an early age, because language is such an important tool in the early emotion socialization process [69,70].…”

A Mixed Methods Study to Examine the Influence of CLIL on Physical Education Lessons: Analysis of Social Interactions and Physical Activity Levels

“…This might be related to the differences by gender that are often found regarding both interpersonal relations, for example, focusing on acceptance within the group (Andueza and Lavega, 2017), and CLIL (Doiz et al, 2014;Fernandez-Barrionuevo and Baena-Extremera, 2018). Therefore, it is necessary to carry out further research on this topic, because the effects on sociometric measures might need longer to appear (van der Wilt et al, 2019).…”

Okul öncesi bütünleştirme uygulamalarında özel gereksinimli ve tipik gelişen çocukların sosyal kabulleri: Boylamsal bir çalışma

“…These findings are consistent with the results of the similar studies in the literature (Bakkaloğlu, Sucuoğlu, & Özbek, 2019;Buysse, Goldman, & Skinner, 2002;Ferreira et. al., 2017;Keane & Calkins, 2004;Koster, Pijl, Nakken, & Van Houten-van den Bosch, 2010;Mand, 2007;van der Wilt, van der Veen, van Kruistum, & van Oers 2019).…”