Session Information
09 SES 01 A, Assessing Students' Attitudes, Behaviours, and Achievement
Paper Session
Contribution
Children’s relationships with peers emerge from 3 years of age. During pre school years friendship group become structured. In the same period some children are at risk to become rejected by peers. However, there is no cause and effect from being rejected to problematic behavior (1). Most essential in middle childhood is the desire to be included in peer-group activities (2). Forces that are maintaining relations with peers have impact on social competence, but also, social adjustment gain from good quality relationships with peers. Both repulsion and popularity emerge within peer groups (3). In classrooms, popular or rejected groups have been shown to be stable over several years. Peer interaction conserves and exaggerates the cluster label (4). Students’ status as either popular or rejected belong to the extremes include an unexpected similarity. Individual students within both extremes have differing self-concepts (5).The wellbeing of classmates is affected by good networks; since it has been shown that classrooms without outliers indicate a lower risk of malaise (6). The sociometric subgroups have also been shown to predict adjustment to school in longitudinal studies (e.g. 7). One problem with marginalized individuals or groups is related to whether they become discriminated or not. However, there may be several different reasons when individuals are not popular but have low status and are not chosen as members of networks within classrooms (e.g.8). There is a relation between lonely children´s feelings, social dissatisfaction and their sociometric status. Investigations including a combination of students’ self-report measures and their sociometric choices of friends to work with are rare (9). This report deals with lonely students who were not chosen as workmates in the classroom by their peers. Their attitudes to school, teacher and peers were compared between each lonely student (LS) and the classmates who were included in bilateral networks in the same class.
The aim was to visualize different categories of lonely students through their attitudes to school, teacher and peers.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
1. Hay, D.F., Payne, A., & Chadwick, A. (2004). Peer relations in childhood. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 45(1): 84-108. 2. Lease, A.M., Musgrove, K.T., & Axelrod, J.L. (2002). Dimensions of social status in preadolescent peer groups: Likability, perceived popularity, and social dominance. Social Development 11: 508-533. 3. Cillessen, A.H.N. (2009). Sociometric methods. In: Handbook of peer interactions, relationships, and groups, eds. K. H. Rubin, W. M. Bukowski, & B. Laursen, p 82-99. 4. Zettergren, P. (2007). Cluster analysis in sociometric research: a pattern-oriented approach to identifying temporally stable peer status groups of girls. The Journal of Early Adolescence, 27(1), 90-114. 5. Jackson, L.D., & Bracken, B.A. (1998). Relationship between students’ social status and global and domain-specific self-concepts. Journal of School Psychology 36(2):233-246 6. Östberg, V. (2003). Children in classrooms: peer status, status distribution and mental well-being. Social Science & Medicine, 56 (1), 17-29. 7. Wentzel, K. R. (2003). Sociometric status and adjustment in middle school: A longitudinal study. The Journal of Early Adolescence, 23 (5), 5-28. 8. Adler, P.A., Kless, S.J., & Adler, P. 1992. Socialisation to gender roles: popularity among elementary school boys and girls. Sociology of Education 65: 169-187. 9. Asher, S.R., Hymel, S., & Renshaw, P.D. (1984). Loneliness in children. Child Development 55(4):1456-1464. 10. Holfve-Sabel, M.-A. (2006). Attitudes towards Swedish comprehensive school. Comparisons over time and between classrooms in grade 6. Göteborg: Göteborg Studies in Educational Sciences 242. HYPERLINK "http://libris.kb.se/bib/10158737" 11. Holfve-Sabel, M-A. & Bengtsson, A. (2009). Application of spectral segregation index (SSI) as a measure of segregation at the individual level in peer networks. Paper given at ECER , Vienna, 2009.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.