Psvchology in rhc Schools 1980. 17. 409-414

CHILDREN’S FRIENDSHIP CHOICES: EFFECTS O F SCHOOL BEHAVIOR JAMES 8. VICTOR * C H A R L E S F. H A L V E R S O N , JR.

Hampton Instituie University of Georgia

This study addresses three issues: (a) Which attributes characterize children’s friendship choices? (b) Which show sex differences? (c) Which dimensions of teacher ratings of behavior contribute to peer selections? The issue of peer-teacher relatedness is addressed by obtaining peer nominations for certain attributes and independent measures of behavior that have been shown to be related to peer popularity. The results demonstrate that: (a) Peer acceptance is indexed by “Like to Sit By,” and this pattern is generally similar for boys and girls, with the exception of the dimension “Good at Games,” which characterizes boys’ choosing peers. (b) The data on peer acceptance and rejection do not result in simple, bipolar dimensions, since these are not highly negatively correlated. (c) When peer nominations are assessed for possible teacher influences, an interesting sex difference emerges: girls prefer not to sit next to children whom their teachers rate as high in behavior problems.

In recent years, there has been a plethora of studies that have used peer sociometrics to study children’s social development, as noted by Hartup (1970). Peer evaluations have been proven to be valuable in assessing children’s behavior in classrooms, and have been shown to be stable over time (Minturn & Lewis, 1968), and also have been validated against a wide variety of criterion measures, including teacher ratings (Pekarik, Prinz, Liebert, Weintraub, & Neale, 1976) and behavioral observations (Winder & Wiggins, 1964).

There are two predominant ways to think about socialization influences in the classroom. First, Rosenthal and Jacobson (1966) place a heavy emphasis on the teacher’s role in socializing children in the classroom. In contrast, McCandless (1969) has suggested that the peer group is the most powerful socializing agent, more powerful even than teachers in school settings. While there is a growing literature reporting teachers’ ratings and peer ratings to be efficient predictors of adjustment, both singly and in com- bination (e.g., Bardon & Bennett, 1972; Bower, 1967), most studies have not assessed how teachers’ perceptions and behavior might influence the formation of social cliques in young children. Rather than focusing on whether teachers or peer groups are more im- portant socializing influences, the question can be phrased in terms of how the two are related. Nash (1973)’ for example, has described how teachers’ perceptions and behaviors have a direct influence on the formation of children’s peer groups.

In earlier papers, the present authors have used peer nominations to study the validity of teachers’ ratings of behavior problems in elementary school children (Halver- son & Victor, 1976; Victor & Halverson, 1975, 1976). In contrast to earlier peer nomina- tion data, however, the data collection methods in these studies allowed peer nominations to be used as measures of individual differences. Maccoby (1966) has suggested the usefulness of investigating the role of sex as a moderator variable in the ex- pression of many cognitive and personality characteristics. For example, teacher ratings of Distractibility, a dimension on which boys display higher mean scores than girls, have

Requests for reprints should be sent to James B. Victor, School of Education, Hampton Institute, H a m p

Portions of this paper were presented at the meeting of the American Educational Research Association,

ton, VA 23668.

Toronto, Canada, March, 1978.

* The order of the authors is arbitrary, as both contributed equally to the paper.

409

410 Psychology in the Schools, July, 1980, Vol. 17. No. 3.

been shown to have a broader correlational pattern for girls than for boys (Victor & Halverson, 1975). I n contrast, ratings of Inadequacy and Immaturity, another dimen- sion, while showing no mean differences between the sexes, proved to have a broader cor- relational pattern and to be a better predictor of later achievement for girls than for boys.

The present study follows the general Maccoby suggestion by investigating cor- relational patterns between teacher judgments and peer choices for each sex separately, to clarify what male and female elementary school children ‘‘mean’’ when they say they “Like to Sit By” someone. The study addresses the issue of peer-teacher relatedness by obtaining and comparing peer nominations for certain attributes (e.g., who is nice, noisy, mean, etc.) and independent measures of behavior that have been shown to be related to peer popularity: (a) Teacher Ratings of Behavior (Nash, 1973), (b) Physical Adeptness (Clarke & Clarke, 1961), (c) In-class Activity Level (Victor & Halverson, 1975), and (d) School Success as measured by standardized achievement scores (e.g., Roff & Sells, 1967).

The present study addresses three issues: (a) Which attributes characterize children’s friendship choices? (b) Which show sex differences? (c) Which dimensions of teacher ratings of behavior contribute to peer selections?

METHOD Subjects

The subjects providing the Peer Nomination data were 249 elementary school children (132 males and 117 females) in grades 3, 4, and 5 in a predominantly white middle-class suburban school. A subsample of 59 children (30 males and 29 females) from grades 3 through 5 were randomly selected from the original sample to examine the relation between peer nominations and independent behavioral assessments. Measures

Peer nominations. All children in the original sample (N=249) selected two boys and two girls from a list of homeroom classmates (approximately 25) in answer to eight questions: “Who are the two boys (girls). , . ( I ) That you would like to sit by? (2) That you would not like to sit by? (3) Who are nice? (4) Who are mean? ( 5 ) Who are most quiet? (6) Who are noisiest? (7) Who are good at outdoor games? and (8) Who are not good at outdoor games?” The children could choose the same person more than once. For the 249 subjects’ choices, each of the eight items was scored two ways, indicating the number of times each child was nominated by all male classmates and by all female classmates, divided by the respective number of male and female classmates. Four choice scores were thus obtained: males choosing males, males choosing females, females choosing males, and females choosing females. Interjudge reliabilities (Gordon, 1969) were analyzed for each class and were acceptable (average r=70).

Independent measures. The following measures also were obtained for each child in the subsample, to help clarify the correlates of peer nominations for male and female students: (a) The Behavior Problem Checklist (Quay & Peterson, 1967), (b) The Kraus- Weber Minimal Physical Fitness Test (Kraus & Hurschland, 1954), (c) In-class Activity Level, measured by a mechanical device (Bell, 1968; Halverson & Waldrop, 1973), (d) The Stanford Achievement Test.

RESULTS Peer Nomination Sample

Correlational analysis was used to explain the data, using the peer nomination of

Children’s Friendship Choices 41 I

TABLE I Correlations for Like to Sit By

with Peer Nominations for Total Sample

Males Choosing Females Choosing Variable Males Females Males Females

Nice .59** .41** .49** .75**

Mean - .30* - .23* - .32** - .35** Quiet .22* .13 .4** .I5 Noisy - .09 -.17 -.17 -.19* Good at Games A** .56** .17 .34** Bad at Games - .27* - .30* .06 - .28* Not Sit By - .35** - .34** -.31* - .35**

*p <.05. * p <.all.

“Like to Sit By” as the organizing variable. Data are summarized in Table 1. A review of the correlations shown in Table 1 indicates that the peer nomination of Nice is a major referent for children when choosing either sex classmate “To Sit By” (with rs ranging from .41 to .75). Both boys and girls also tend to use the peer nominations of Quiet (positive) and Mean (negative) when choosing children “To Sit By.” Children also use Good at Games as a referent when choosing male and female classmates (with rs ranging from .17 to S6) ; however, Good at Games is not used as much by females as by males when choosing playmates (male r=.57, p<.OOl; female r=.26, p<.O1; z=2.93, p< .Ol ) . Subsample

TABLE 2 Correlations for Like to Sit By with Behavior Problems,

Physical Fitness, Activity Level, and Achievement

Males Choosing Females Choosing Variable Males Females Males Females

~ ~

Behavior Problems - .07 - .22 -.41* - .46* Physical Fitness .32 .30 .32 .45* Activity Level .20 - .44* .I9 - .45* Achievement -.21 - .07 -.14 .13

*p <.05.

Correlations between the independent behavioral measures and peer nominations are shown in Table 2. Activity Level shows a nonsignificant but positive correlation with “Like to Sit By” for male and female children when choosing males (r=.20 and .19), but significant negative correlations when choosing females (r= -.44 and -.45). These cor- relations are significantly different for males and females (z= 2.45, p < .02). Male selec- tions when choosing males and females “To Sit By” are not significantly related to teachers’ ratings of the total number of behavior problems (r=-.07 and -.22), but

412 Psychology in the Schools, July, 1980, Vol. 17, No. 3.

female selections when choosing both boys and girls are significantly related ( r= -.41 and -.46). Neither male nor female selections relate significantly to achievement (with rs ranging from -.21 to .13). Finally, Physical Fitness shows a low but positive correlation when males and females are choosing both sexes (with rs ranging from .30 to .45).

To clarify further the relations between the peer nomination data and teachers’ ratings of behavior problems, scores were devised for the Distractibility dimension. Distractibility is a factor analytically-derived dimension of the Behavior Problem Checklist, found to be a conceptually distinct dimension from the Conduct Problem dimension by the presence of both sex differences and differences in the pattern of cor- relations for the sexes (O’Donnell & Van Tuinan, 1979; Victor & Halverson, 1975).

TABLE 3 Correlations for Teacher- Rated Distractibility

with the Peer Nomination Variables

Males Choosing Females Choosing Variables Males Females Males Females

Nice Mean Quiet Noisy Good at Games Bad at Games Like to Sit By Not Sit By

- .26 .41*

-.32 .38* .09

- 2 1 - .04

.18

- .30 .05

- .28 .28

- .20 - .05

- .03 .04

- .18 .45*

-.34 .48** .05

-.19 - .40*

.56**

-.31 .79**

- .31 .51**

- .13 .07

- .42 .54**

*p <.05. * p <.01.

Table 3 illustrates the correlations for Distractibility and the peer nomination variables. These correlations demonstrate two things quite clearly: first, females are sen- sitive to teachers’ judgments of distractibility to a greater extent than are boys, agreeing with the teachers in their judgments of Mean and Noisy peers (average r, females=.58, p<.05; males=.28, n.s.). Second, the girls also find peers who are judged as distractible to be the ones they do “Not Like to Sit By,” while boys are not sensitive to these teacher judgments when choosing peers to sit by (average r, females=.54, p<.O1; males=.06, n.s.).

DIscUSStON First, the data on peer nominations clearly demonstrate that peer acceptance is in-

dexed by “Like to Sit By” nominations, a pattern similar for both boys and girls, with the exception of the dimension “Good at Games.” Boys apparently are much more at- tuned to children’s athletic ability when choosing peers than are girls. In this sense, it could be said that boys seem to be sensitive to behavioral differences in children in situations other than the classroom (presumably, their performance in athletic activities outside of the classroom). Second, the data on peer acceptance and rejection (“Like to Sit By”-Not Like to Sit By;” Nice, and Mean) do not result in simple, bipolar dimen- sions, in that they are not highly negatively correlated. These findings replicate other

Children’s Friendship Choices 413

studies of peer nominations, where these two dimensions tend to be separate aspects of peer judgment (Moore & Updegraff, 1964; Roff & Sells, 1967). When studying peer choices, care must be taken to include both negative and positive dimensions of peer acceptance.

When peer nominations are assessed for possible teacher influences, an interesting sex difference emerges: girls seem much more attuned to what teachers think about other children than do boys. Girls prefer not to sit next to children whom their teachers rate as high in behavior problems. They also tend to match their teachers’ perceptions by agree- ing that children seen as problems are mean and noisy.

In looking at all of the results together, we find boys sensitive to behavioral differences in a typically male activity (Good at Games) and relatively insensitive to teacher opinions about children. Girls, on the other hand, seem to base a good deal of their in-class preferences on what the teachers think of children-they seem to avoid those children the teachers think are “problems” and tend to associate with “good” children.

The Distractibility dimension may help explain the data in two ways. Boys are significantly more Distractible than girls, leading to their inattentiveness in classroom situations, which in turn gets them into “trouble” and affects judgments made by their more attentive opposite sex classmates. Studies are needed to specify the teacher behaviors involved and the social processes important to the development of the school influences on peer selection demonstrated by these data.

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