Childhood peer relationships social acceptance,friendship peer networks

Childhood peer relationships:social acceptance,friendships,and peer networksMary E.Gifford-Smith a ,Celia A.Brownell b,*aDuke University,Durham,NC,USA b University of Pittsburgh,Pittsburgh,P A,USA Received 28October 2002;accepted 28October 2002This review addresses several areas of contemporary research in children’s peer relationships during the elementary and middle school years,with primary foci on children’s peer acceptance,the ability to make and maintain friendships,and their participation in larger peer networks.Particular attention is given to research examining the major developments and individual differences in each of these components of children’s peer relations,how these different aspects of peer functioning relate to one another,and how they contribute to development more generally,including school adjustment and achievement.Finally,it is argued that children’s psychosocial development may be best informed by an integration of these somewhat independent research traditions.D 2003Society for the Study of School Psychology.Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.All rights reserved.Keywords:Friendship;Social acceptance;Peer networksIntroductionThe world of children and their peers has captivated developmental psychologists for more than three decades (Hartup,1970),and its study over this period has yielded a number of interesting and important insights.We now know that peer relations change in systematic ways as children age,and they serve different purposes in children’s lives at different ages.What happens in children’s peer groups and friendship relations affects development and functioning in probably every other aspect of children’s lives,including the family,the school,and the community.And the goings-on in these settings in turn0022-4405/03/$-see front matter D 2003Society for the Study of School Psychology.Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/S0022-4405(03)00048-7*Corresponding author.Psychology Department,University of Pittsburgh,3409Sennott Square,Pittsburgh,PA 15260,USA.Tel.:+1-412-624-4510;fax:+1-412-624-4428.E-mail address:brownell@ (C.A.Brownell).Journal of School Psychology41(2003)235–284affect children’s functioning in their peer groups.Thus,children’s relationships with their peers and friends are associated with multiple aspects of development and adjustment,including their achievement in school.In this review,we will discuss several primary areas of contemporary research in children’s peer relationships during the school years,with emphasis on elementary school and middle childhood.Our goal is notto provide a comprehensive review,but rather to be representative.We will chart the major developments and individual differences in each of several components of children’s peer relations,how these different aspects of peer functioning relate to one another,and how they contribute to development more generally,including school adjustment and achievement.We will draw primarily from work in developmental psychology since that is where our own expertise lies.A number of important changes occur in children’s peer-relevant social worlds during the primary school years.These shifts produce both new demands and new opportunities for social and emotional growth.By middle childhood,more than 30%of children’s social interactions involve peers.Peer groups enlarge and are less closely supervised by adults,including parents,than was true at prior ages.Peer groups themselves become defined relative to one another,in the familiar phenomenon of ‘‘cliques,’’which emerge in late childhood and pre-adolescence.Middle childhood peer groups exist in a wide assortment of settings outside the home and classroom,whereas peer contacts during the preschool years were typically in home,child-care,or arranged play settings (Rubin,Bukowski,&Parker,1998).Contexts for peer interaction also increasingly include remote electronic contact by computer (e-mail,‘‘instant messaging,’’and on-line ‘‘chatting’’),an area that,to our knowledge,has not yet received focused research attention despite the growing number of anecdotal reports from parents of the many hours their children spend in such activities.What children do with their peers also shifts over childhood,from spending most of their time in active or pretend play in the early years,to engaging in organized activities such as sports or games,‘‘just hanging out,’’and talking and gossiping in middle childhood and pre-adolescence (Zarbatany,Hartmann,&Rankin,1990).Thus,it is during middle childhood that children can truly be said to participate in a separate social world of their peers.Although this world is by no means independent from the family,the school,and other social institutions,there are unique features of peer relationships that set the world of peers apart from children’s other socialization experiences.Investigators of children’s peer relationships have conceptualized and studied them in a number of different ways that are only partially overlapping.One pervasive distinction in the research literature is between group-based peer interactions and relationships,and dyadic peer interactions and relationships.At the level of the group,children’s peer relationships can be characterized in terms of likeability or social acceptance group members (e.g.,popularity or rejection),in terms of visibility or salience group,how connected they are to the other children in the group (e.g.,network their dominance in the group hierarchy (Hawley,2002),their ‘‘reputation’’or how they are perceived by their peers (e.g.,Hymel,Bowker,&Woody,1993;Waas &Honer,1990),or in terms of the larger social networks in which they move and with which they identify (Cairns,Xie,&Leung,1998;Farmer &Rodkin,1996;Gest,Graham-Bermann,&Hartup,2001).At the dyadic level,researchers have predominantly studied children’s friendships (Bukowski,Newcomb,&Hartup,1996;Hartup W.W.,1996).More recently,they haveM.E.Gifford-Smith,C.A.Brownell /Journal of School Psychology 41(2003)235–284236M.E.Gifford-Smith,C.A.Brownell/Journal of School Psychology41(2003)235–284237 begun to study other dyadic relationships as well,such as bully–victim relationships (Hodges&Card,in press),and mutual antipathies or enemies(Abecassis,Hartup, Haselager,Scholte,&van Lieshout,in press;Hartup&Abecassis,in press).In the current review,we focus primarily on children’s acceptance by their peer groups, the nature and quality of their friendships,and their participation in larger peer networks. Although children’s day-to-day peer relationships cut across all of these arenas,research has tended to concentrate on them independently rather than integratively,as does our review.Research on children’s peer relationships is conducted almost exclusively in schools,and children’s experiences with peers in school have been linked to other aspects of their developing social competence as well as to academic success.Hence,we focus here on school-based peer relations and their associations with social and academic functioning.Finally,we close by discussing the few empirical efforts to consider children’s peer experiences more broadly,and how the nature and quality of peer experiences are both similar and different across these three domains.Individual differences in children’s social competence:sociometric status and social behaviorPeer acceptance is distinct from other aspects of peer functioning,most notably friendship and social network participation.At the most general level,peer acceptance, or sociometric status,refers to the degree to which children are liked or disliked by the children in their peer group.Because sociometric status research has grown out of the tradition of developmental psychology,it has emphasized individual differences in social experiences.Thus,sociometric classifications(described below)have been used as a tool to index or describe an individual child’s place within the larger peer group rather than to describe the interpersonal processes or structural characteristics of the peer group itself (Cairns et al.,1998).Modern sociometric research has its roots in the work of Jacob Moreno who suggested that peer experience could be best understood as the product of three distinct interpersonal forces:attraction,repulsion,and indifference(Moreno,1934).Reflecting these dimensions, current sociometric methods solicit information from children regarding their positive and negative feelings about their peers to derive the now well known sociometric‘‘categories’’: popular children,who are well liked by many peers and seldom disliked;rejected children, who are frequently disliked and not well-liked;controversial children who are both liked and disliked,and neglected children who receive very few liked or disliked nominations.Of primary interest have been questions addressing why certain children become popular or well-liked,while others are rejected or neglected by their peers and how a child’s social status can be understood within the broader context of individual development.More specifically,research on sociometric status has been shaped by four primary aims: (1)Identifying characteristics of the individual child that contribute to the formation andmaintenance of social status(e.g.,behavior and social cognitions);(2)Identifying features of or processes within the larger peer group that relate to socialstatus acquisition and maintenance(e.g.,reputational bias and group norms);(3)Identifying early experiences that influence children’s social status within the peergroup (e.g.,parenting strategies and attachment);(4)Exploring the link between peer status and other developmental outcomes (e.g.,schoolsuccess/failure and delinquency).Historically,the lion’s share of empirical and conceptual work has focused on the first of these areas-identifying the correlates of sociometric status.Early work focused on fairly straightforward,global comparisons across status groups with respect to a variety of behavioral and social cognitive variables (see Coie,Dodge,&Kupersmidt,1990;New-comb,Bukowski,&Pattee,1993for detailed reviews).More recently,the growing recognition that status categories are not necessarily homogeneous entities has led to studies exploring subtypes of children within a particular category (e.g.,aggressive-rejected versus nonaggressive-rejected children)(Bierman,Smoot,&Aumiller,1993;Harrist,Zaia,Bates,Dodge,&Pettit,1997).At the same time,researchers have considered the behavioral correlates of status on a more molecular level,identifying different forms and functions of a variety of social behaviors related to status (e.g.,proactive and reactive aggression)(Coie,Dodge,Terry,&Wright,1991;Crick,1996).Concurrent with these trends,researchers interested in the developmental significance of sociometric status began exploring links between earlier experiences (e.g.,parenting styles and the experience of abuse)and social status (see Ladd,1999for review),while others began to delineate the relations between sociometric status and developmental outcomes (e.g.,delinquency and school failure)(see Ollendick,Weist,Borden,&Greene,1992;Parker &Asher,1987).By the mid-1990s,these investigations became still more complex,involving larger longitudinal data sets,with the goal of building and testing conceptual models to predict the development of a variety of externalizing and internal-izing outcomes (Dodge et al.,in press;Ladd,Kochenderfer,&Coleman,1997;Miller-Johnson et al.,2002).In these studies,sociometric status or peer acceptance is one variable among many thought to influence social development,and the primary objective is understanding the complex interplay among these variables.Perhaps not surprisingly,as the questions and methods for studying sociometric status have become more complex and time-consuming,the volume and centrality of work concerning status has decreased (J.Coie,personal communication,September 2002).Nevertheless,sociometric status con-tinues to be an important area of attention for researchers attempting to understand the development of children’s social and emotional competence.As a review of the major conceptual and empirical work in each of the research areas outlined above is beyond the scope of this paper,the remainder of this section will be devoted to those questions and issues that are currently most salient:(1)methodological issues concerning the measurement of sociometric status;(2)recent findings concerning the correlates of social status,focusing particularly on heterogeneity within status categories;and (3)group processes related to status formation and maintenance.Dis-cussion of links between social status and other developmental outcomes (e.g.,school drop-out and delinquency)will be limited to those outcomes most directly related to school performance.Readers interested in associations between family experiences and peer status and/or between peer status and antisocial behavioral outcomes more generally are directed to recent reviews by Ladd (1999)and Rubin et al.(1998).M.E.Gifford-Smith,C.A.Brownell /Journal of School Psychology 41(2003)235–284238M.E.Gifford-Smith,C.A.Brownell/Journal of School Psychology41(2003)235–284239 Methodological issues in studying sociometric statusThe veritable explosion of interest in sociometric status over the last several decades has been driven,in part,by the development of efficient and reliable methods of measuring children’s status.Most researchers choose one of two widely recognized methods-peer nominations or peer ratings.As these methods are described in detail elsewhere(Coie& Dodge,1983;Coie,Dodge,&Coppotelli,1982;Newcomb&Bukowski,1983),they will be reviewed only briefly here.However,understanding how these constructs are operationalized is important not only for evaluating the sociometric status literature,but also for exploring how status,social network,and friendship research are interrelated,an issue that will be taken up later in this paper.Peer nominationsThe most commonly cited procedure for measuring sociometric status via peer nominations was developed by Coie et al.(1982).Based on the recognition that peer acceptance and peer rejection were not opposite ends of the same continuum,Coie and colleagues argued for assessing these dimensions of social experience separately.To accomplish this,children are typically asked to nominate,from a roster of their peers, those children whom they‘‘most like’’or‘‘like most to play with’’and those children whom they‘‘most dislike’’or‘‘least like to play with.’’Peer acceptance is defined,at the most basic level,as the number of most liked nominations received,while peer rejection is viewed as the number of least liked nominations.Children’s raw scores for peer acceptance and peer rejection are typically standardized either at the classroom or grade level(sometimes within gender,sometimes not)and are then combined to derive scores for social preference and social impact.Preference refers to the standardized difference between the number of most liked and least liked nominations, while impact is conceptualized as the standardized sum of most liked and least liked scores. Preference and impact are then combined to derive five mutually exclusive sociometric categories:popular,rejected,neglected,controversial,and average(for details,see Coie& Dodge,1983,1988).Newcomb and Bukowski(1983)advocate a variation of this method in which binomial probabilities,rather than standard scores,are used to classify children into sociometric categories.Here,classification into groups(i.e.,popular,rejected,etc.)is based on the extent to which a child’s liked and disliked scores exceed chance levels.Because Newcomb and Bukowski utilize a more conservative cut-off score,smaller,more homoge-neous,and more extreme groups are identified using their procedure.Both procedures have advantages and limitations.For example,more extreme groups have greater behavioral discriminability but are less stable and may overlook children that,while not severely troubled,are nevertheless‘‘at risk’’for negative outcomes(Terry&Coie,1991).Regardless of the particular method used,the conceptualization of acceptance and rejection as separate dimensions of social experience allows researchers to distinguish children whose low peer acceptance is due to outright rejection from those with mixed reputations(e.g.,controversial)and those who have low visibility within the peer group (e.g.,neglected children).As these different groups of children have been found to have different behavioral and cognitive profiles as well as different developmental trajectories (Newcomb et al.,1993),these distinctions have proved critical.Peer ratingsAnother widely used method for assessing peer status is children’s ratings of their peers.In this procedure,children are asked to rate each of their peers on a single scale of likeability,anchored on one end by a score reflecting acceptance (‘‘like very much’’)and on the other end by a score reflecting rejection (‘‘dislike very much’’).The mean rating received across respondents is taken to reflect an individual child’s level of social acceptance within the group.Because it relies on a unidimensional system for measuring peer acceptance,the rating scale approach is not typically used to derive the sociometric categories described above.For this reason,and also because administration puts greater demands on the respondent,the use of rating scales has become less common (Maassen,van der Linden,Goossens,&Bokhorst,2000).However,proponents of this system argue that because ratings systems allow children to evaluate every member of their peer group as well as to provide information on the degree of liking or disliking they feel,ratings provide a more detailed and potentially more valid measure of peer group acceptance than nominations (Maassen et al.,2000).Additionally,several researchers have developed techniques for deriving extreme groups from rating scale responses (Asher &Dodge,1986;Maassen,Akkermans,&van der Linden,1996;Maassen et al.,2000).This suggests that the rating method offers a viable alternative to the nomination procedure,particularly in settings where children know each other well (e.g.,small to moderately sized class-rooms,schools characterized by stable populations)or where negative nominations are not permitted.In sum,while methods based on ratings and nominations differ in important respects,the findings they produce are reasonably comparable,depending on how the data are analyzed.While the nomination method appears to be the procedure of choice,especially in recent years,the ratings method supplements our understanding of social status in important ways.Additionally,the ratings method,as will be discussed later,overlaps less with methods for assessing friendship and social networks,allowing a more rigorous examination of relations among these distinct constructs.Correlates of sociometric statusSociometric status,ostensibly a reflection of the peer group’s perception of the individual child,has been most commonly treated by developmental psychologists as an attribute or characteristic of the child.It is not surprising,then,that the search for determinants of children’s sociometric status has also concentrated on characteristics of individual children.In a now substantial empirical literature,sociometric status has been shown to relate to individual physical characteristics such as attractiveness and athleticism (Li,1985);to individual behavioral styles such as propensity to be aggressive versus prosocial in peer encounters (Coie et al.,1990);to individual social skills including communicative behavior (Burleson et al.,1986)and group entry skills (Putallaz &Gottman,1981);to individual social-cognitive skills such as social problem solving and evaluating others’intent (Dodge &Feldman,1990);and to individual differences in emotion regulation (Fabes &Eisenberg,1992).As this research has been reviewed extensively elsewhere (Coie et al.,1990;Newcomb et al.,1993),the ensuing discussionM.E.Gifford-Smith,C.A.Brownell /Journal of School Psychology 41(2003)235–284240M.E.Gifford-Smith,C.A.Brownell/Journal of School Psychology41(2003)235–284241 will focus on more recent trends within this literature,particularly the growing recognition of within-rather than between-group differences in the correlates of social status.Over the past decade,the emphasis of status research has evolved from studies exploring differences in the behavioral or social profiles of children of varying status groups(e.g.,how rejected children differ from their non-rejected peers)to more fine-tuned analyses of heterogeneity within the traditionally recognized sociometric categories(e.g., subtypes of rejected children).Similarly,rather than simply identifying global categories of behavior linked to social status(e.g.,aggression and withdrawal),researchers have moved toward more molecular assessments,examining the forms,functions,and meanings of social behavior within the interactional context.In fact,this more molecular examina-tion of social behavior,particularly aggression,has supplanted,to some extent,the research on sociometric status as the primary focus of researchers interested in individual differences in children’s peer relations and their relations to developmental outcomes.The remainder of this section will provide a very brief review of the behavioral and social cognitive correlates of each sociometric category(for more detailed review,see Newcomb et al.,1993),which will be followed by a more detailed analysis of work examining behavioral heterogeneity within each group(e.g.,subtypes of rejection). RejectionRejected children appear to be at greater risk for negative developmental outcomes than children from other status groups(Ollendick et al.,1992;Parker&Asher,1987)and,as a consequence,they have received the bulk of the conceptual and empirical attention.Of primary interest has been the relatively robust link between rejected status and aggressive behavior.Children identified as rejected have been shown to engage in higher frequencies of aggression(Dodge,1983;Newcomb et al.,1993),to engage in more hostile and unprovoked aggression(Coie et al.,1991),to use aggression to solve conflict or obtain desired objects(Coie et al.,1991),and to respond aggressively to ambiguous provocation (Feldman&Dodge,1987).These links have been noted both in naturally occurring or established peer groups and in newly formed,lab-based playgroups,implicating aggres-sion in both the formation and maintenance of peer rejection.Related to these differences in aggressive behavior,rejected children have been shown to demonstrate social cognitive biases that likely mediate the relationship between rejection and aggression.For example,rejected children are more likely than their non-rejected peers to interpret ambiguous overtures as hostile(Dodge et al.,in press;Feldman &Dodge,1987),to generate and positively evaluate aggressive solutions to social problems(Crick&Ladd,1990),and to endorse emotionally reactive and sensation-seeking goals(Hinshaw&Melnick,1995).While the evidence linking aggressive behavior and social cognitive biases to peer rejection is both widely replicated and compelling,it does not tell the whole story.First, only about half of all children identified as aggressive are rejected by their peers(Coie et al.,1991).This suggests that differences must exist in how aggression is used by children of different status.The severity of aggression and the reasons for which it is used(e.g., proactive versus reactive aggression)have been shown to distinguish between rejected and non-rejected children(Coie et al.,1991;Price&Dodge,1989).Second,the fact that the link between aggression and rejection does not hold equally for boys and girls has led toadvances in our understanding of relational or social aggression,a form of aggression that appears to be more salient in girls groups (Crick,1996).Finally,the link between aggression and rejection,while present at each age,changes with development (Coie et al.,1990).Not only does the relationship weaken with age,but the norms for both the expression of aggression and its acceptability appear to change with age as well.Proactiveand reactive aggressionBased on the finding not all children are rejected,Coie et al.(1991)hypothesized that differences in the frequency of aggression may not be as important as qualitative differences in the nature and function of aggression used by children of different status.To test this hypothesis,they formed lab-based play groups of rejected and non-rejected 7-and 9-year-old boys rated as aggressive by their peers and then examined the frequency and nature of naturally occurring aggressive episodes.Three types of episodes were identified-reactive aggression (aggression in response to provocation),instrumental aggression (aggression to obtain an object or position),and bullying (unprovoked,person-centered aggression).Results suggested that the relevance of these different forms of aggression for rejection varied somewhat with age.Among older children,all three forms of aggression were related to rejection,whereas among younger children only instrumental aggression significantly related to rejection.These findings suggest that bullying and reactive aggression have less negative sequelae for younger children,perhaps because person-oriented aggression is more normative at that age.Another possibility,according to Coie and colleagues,is that bullying is more adaptive at younger ages when techniques for establishing social dominance are relatively unsophis-ticated.As children develop more subtle means for obtaining dominance,bullying and reactive aggression may be viewed more negatively by peers.These early findings suggest that examining the different forms and functions of aggression may be helpful in understanding the relation between aggression and rejection.However,it should be noted that the high degree of correlation between reactive and proactive aggression (estimates of r =.70are typical)makes delineating their differential contributions challenging.Gender differences in the link between aggression and rejectionOne major limitation of the work linking aggression to rejection is that it has been conducted almost exclusively on boys’groups,and boys of low socioeconomic status in particular,or on groups too small to assess gender differences adequately.In addition,until fairly recently,the singular focus on overt forms of aggression (e.g.,physical and verbal)appears to have obscured the link between aggression and rejection among girls,in part because of the relatively low base rates of these behaviors within girls’groups (Maccoby &Jacklin,1980).Building on the seminal work of Crick &Grotpeter (1995)and Underwood,Galen,and Paquette (2001),researchers have now begun to investigate relational or social aggression,a non-physical form of aggression characterized by the use of exclusion,negative gossip,and verbal threats.While both boys and girls engage in relational aggression,there is growing evidence to suggest that this form of aggression is more frequent among girls (Crick &Grotpeter,1995),is perceived by girls to be more hurtful (Galen &Underwood,1997;Paquette &Underwood,1999),and is more likely to be associated with peer rejection for girls than for boys (Crick,1996;Crick &Grotpeter,M.E.Gifford-Smith,C.A.Brownell /Journal of School Psychology 41(2003)235–284242M.E.Gifford-Smith,C.A.Brownell/Journal of School Psychology41(2003)235–2842431995).Furthermore,the link between relational aggression and rejection has been demonstrated across developmental periods.These studies suggest that the forms and frequency of aggression differ in girls’groups relative to boys’groups and correspond-ingly,that relations between aggression and social status may differ for boys and girls.Developmental changes in the link between aggression and peer rejection The link between aggression and peer rejection has been found at each major developmental period(preschool,school-age,and adolescence).However,the nature of this relation changes with development.In preschool and the primary grades,aggression occurs more frequently than in older groups and is more closely related to both incidental and chronic rejection(Cillessen,van Ijzendoorn,van Lieshout,&Hartup,1992;Coie et al.,1990;Vitaro,Tremblay,&Gagnon,1992).Normative changes in the expression of aggression(e.g.,from physical to verbal forms)and in the perceived acceptability of aggression contribute to a weakening of the relationship between aggression and rejection with age(Coie,Terry,Zakriski,&Lochman,1995;Luther&McMahon, 1996).For example,in a longitudinal examination of rejected children,Sandstrom and Coie(1999)report that aggressive fourth grade boys actually experienced greater increases in social preference over time than their nonaggressive-rejected peers.The authors suggest that these findings may be due,in part,to increasing acceptability or even desirability of aggressive behavior in certain types of situations or within certain populations,for example,among urban adolescents.Importantly,Sandstrom and Coie go on to suggest that developmental changes in the structure of the peer group,including the emergence of cliques,may underlie important age shifts in the link between aggression and rejection.Just as all aggressive children are not rejected by their peers,not all children identified as rejected are aggressive(French,1998).Considerably less is known about rejected,non-aggressive children,in part because this group appears to be quite heterogeneous.While several studies have suggested that non-aggressive rejected children may be more shy and withdrawn than their aggressive rejected peers(Cillessen et al.,1992;Rubin,LeMare,& Lollis,1990),these behaviors do not consistently differentiate them from non-rejected children.Another characteristic that may serve to discriminate non-aggressive rejected children is atypical or non-normative behavior(Bierman et al.,1993).In a sample of school-age rejected boys,non-aggressive rejected children were described by their peers as socially awkward and incompetent or prone to strange behaviors.Consistent with these findings,recent work examining sociometric status differences in children’s teasing behavior suggests that rejected children are more likely than their non-rejected peers to be teased for non-normative or unusual behavior(Gifford-Smith,1998).Finally,there is some suggestion that non-aggressive-rejected children are less at risk for poor social developmental outcomes than their rejected aggressive peers,possibly because rejection in the absence of aggression is a less stable phenomenon,particularly at younger ages (Bierman&Wargo,1995;Cillessen et al.,1992;Pettit,Clawson,Dodge,&Bates,1996). If,in fact,rejection in the absence of aggression has to do with relatively subtle norm violations,it would be reasonable to assume that the significance of such deviations for social status would change as a function of developmental and contextual changes in what constitutes normative behavior.。