A contextual approach to social skills assessment in the peer group: Who is the best judge?
Summary (4 min read)
Introduction
- In an effort to integrate theories of social competence, Dirks, Treat, and Weersing (2007) identified four factors involved in defining social competence: child, behavior, situation, and judge.
- The situation and judge are important to consider because individuals’ social goals, cognitions, and behaviors are largely shaped by the interpersonal relationships they form in a specific context (Reis, Collins, & Berscheid, 2000; Salmivalli & Peets, 2009).
- Conceptually, a contextual approach to the assessment of social skills recognizes that the demands, goals, and rules of social behaviors differ across situations and participants, and, thus, a child’s social skills need to be assessed in a contextspecific manner.
A Contextual Approach to Social Skills Assessment in the Peer Group
- Among the contexts within which children are a part, the peer group becomes an increasingly important social context as children move through elementary school (Rubin, Bukowski, & Parker, 2006).
- To be successful in the peer group, children need to understand and behave consistently with the implicit and explicit social demands in that context.
- Social skillfulness and competence in the peer group appears also to have significant implications for school outcomes.
- Empirical investigations of a contextual approach to social skills assessment in the peer group have been sparse.
- Findings suggested that, despite some intriguing differences among reporters, they also identified many overlapping behaviors.
Peers and Teachers as Judges of Children’s Social Skills
- Peers and teachers have many opportunities to “judge” or evaluate children’s social skills in the peer group.
- Peers also serve as valuable informants in the assessment of children’s positive and negative social characteristics (Masten, Morison, & Pellegrini, 1985).
- Given the meaningful differences in the experiences and perceptions between peers and teachers, it is important to understand the incremental validity of each as evaluators on children’s social skills.
- A study that involved preschool children showed that teacher-rated, as opposed to peer-nominated, popularity was more strongly related to children’s social competence (Connolly & Doyle, 1981).
- These findings together suggest that teachers and peers might provide neither redundant nor incorrect information; rather, their incremental validity might differ, depending on many factors, including the type of behaviors assessed, outcome criteria, and the child’s developmental stage.
This Study
- This study builds on a previous study that identified contextually relevant social behaviors in the peer group (Warnes et al., 2005).
- In particular, a number of studies have shown that perceived popularity, albeit related, is meaningfully distinct from sociometric popularity (see Mayeux, Houser, & Dyches, 2011).
- Thus, in addition to peer acceptance, the authors examined whether socially skilled children also are perceived as being popular, have more reciprocated friendships, and enjoy high centrality in a smaller unit of an affiliation-based peer group (i.e., clique).
- The authors speculated that, although both teacher- and peer-assessed social skills predict the outcomes of interest, the incremental validity of peer assessment of social skills might be particularly pronounced for social status.
- Research suggests that, as compared with boys, girls display higher levels of social skills (Gresham & Elliott, 1990; Zakriski, Wright, & Underwood, 2005).
Participants
- Participants were 342 (180 male and 162 female) students and their classroom teachers (N = 22) from three elementary schools in Midwestern rural communities.
- According to school records, 94% of students were White.
- For the 22 classroom teachers, all were White and 19 were female.
Procedures
- Consent forms with a brief written study description were sent home for parents and were also distributed to teachers.
- Accordingly, the consent rate was determined across classrooms in a grade level.
- Child assent was obtained and students were told they were allowed to decline participation in the study at any time.
- Confidentiality was discussed before the survey administration, and participants were provided with an index card to cover their answers.
- Students were allowed time to review the rosters prior to completing the nomination measures.
Study Constructs and Measures
- Three broad constructs were of interest in this study: contextually relevant social skills in the peer group, social status, and positive school functioning.
- In turn, children’s social skills were assessed by peer nominations and teacher ratings.
- The number of nominations standardized by grade level and gender was highly correlated with that standardized by grade level only (rs = .90s).
- As the focus of this study, a child’s within clique centrality, or visibility within the clique, was determined in two steps (Estell et al., 2008).
Descriptive Analyses of Peer- and TeacherAssessed Social Skills
- Means and standard deviations of and correlations among study variables are presented in Table 2.
- Teacher- and peer-assessed social skills were moderately correlated with each other, r = .51, p < .01.
Predictability for Social Status and Positive School Functioning
- The authors examined the degree to which contextually relevant social skills predict children’s social status and positive school functioning.
- Results did not suggest a collinearity problem: the tolerance and the VIF of the two predictors were 0.73 and 1.37, respectively.
- Finally, the authors examined whether multilevel analyses should be conducted given the nested structure of the data (i.e., children nested in the classroom).
- After controlling for peer-assessed social skills, teacher-assessed social skills did not uniquely and significantly predict children’s clique centrality (see Table 4).
- Teacher-assessed social skills accounted for an additional 5% (sr = .23) of the variance in children’s school liking and 5% (sr = .22) of the variance in academic competence above and beyond that accounted for by peer-assessed social skills.
Gender as a Moderator
- Finally, the authors examined whether the association between social skills and the study outcomes was moderated by gender.
- For simplicity, the authors used peer-assessed social skills only as predictors because the results suggested that peer-assessed social skills are as good as or better than teacher-assessed social skills in predicting study outcomes.
- Again, a series of multiple regression analyses and a logistic regression analysis were conducted.
- Peer-assessed social skills, gender, and the interaction between the two served as predictors, and social status indicators and school functioning outcomes served as dependent variables.
- Results indicated that none of the interactions were statistically significant across the outcomes, suggesting that the positive effects of social skills on social status and school functioning outcomes are similar for boys and girls.
Discussion
- This study is grounded in the largely underexamined notion that children’s social skills are contextually bound; thus, the assessment of social skills should be context specific and consider the perceptions of the people involved in that context.
- This study built on previous work that identified important and meaningful social skills in the peer group based on a contextual approach to assessment (Warnes et al., 2005).
Contextually Relevant Social Skills in the Peer Group
- As anticipated, contextually relevant social skills were significantly related to a variety of indicators of children’s social status in the peer group and positive school functioning.
- The demonstrated associations between social skills and a broad range of social status indicators uniquely adds to the literature because, unlike peer acceptance, perceived popularity, reciprocated friendships, and clique centrality have rarely been examined as outcome criteria of social skills.
- The overall variance explained by peer- and teacher-assessed social skills together was greater for social status (18%–49%) than for positive school functioning (14%–24%).
- These children were also rated as more popular by teachers.
- The findings add to the literature on the incremental validity of different informants.
Gender Effect
- Findings did not suggest that gender moderates the effect of social skills on children’s social status and positive school functioning.
- That is, although research has shown gender differences in social skills favoring girls (Gresham & Elliott, 1990; Zakriski et al., 2005), social skills appear to be equally effective for both boys and girls for social and academic adjustment.
- It should be noted, however, that the measure used in this study tapped heterogeneous facets of social skills that might or might not be gender specific.
Implications for Practice and Research
- Whereas parents and teachers often serve as evaluators of children’s social skills, the results of this study support peers as promising evaluators of social skills.
- Peer-assessed social skills might be useful in identifying children who lack in social skills and might benefit from social skills training.
- They might be involved in a screening process.
- A concrete and effective manifestation of prosocial behavior might depend on the specific relational context (Reis et al., 2000).
- In contrast, it is believed that the development of social skills that are generalizable across settings should begin in a context that is immediate and natural to children such as the peer group (Sheridan et al., 1999).
Limitations and Future Directions
- Generalizability of the findings should be considered in light of the study participants and setting.
- As such, they may have more opportunities to interact with children and families outside of the classroom, thus, broadening the contexts within which rural teachers observe children’s skills.
- Indeed, evidence suggests that the association between social and academic competence is reciprocal among children in the lower elementary years (Welsh, Parke, Widaman, & O’Neil, 2001).
- Also, increased understanding is warranted in terms of personal and contextual factors that moderate, mediate, or both, the relation between social skills and various adjustment outcomes.
- This study was supported by Federal Grant #R305B080010 awarded to Susan M. Sheridan and Todd Glover by the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences.
Contextually Relevant Social Skills.
- Shows others kids that he/she cares when they are sad.
- Does not say things that hurt other kids.
- Lets other kids have their way sometimes when they disagree.
- Does not get upset with other kids when he/she doesn’t get his/her way.
- Hangs out with kids who take schoolwork seriously.
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