Same-gender Acceptance and Rejection and the Divided Self in School-age Boys and Girls

• In Event: 2-158 - Children's Perceptions of Their Social World: Effects on Socioemotional Adjustment and Peer Relations

Integrative Statement

INTRODUCTION: According to developmental theory, the formation of the self is inextricably related to experiences with peers during the school-age years. Existing literature provides general support for the hypothesis that acceptance and rejection in the peer group account for variations in children’s self-perceptions of their competence and well being. This literature, however, is constrained by two limitations. The first limitation concerns a basic conceptualization and the resultant practice in theory and research on the self concept. Dimensions of the self are typically, if not universally, conceptualized as having a single factor structure that has a positive end and a negative end. This view implies that individuals see themselves according to dimensions that vary from very positive to very negative. This assumption is manifested in measures of the self that typically aggregate positive and negative items together to create a single index. The second limitation concerns the practice of assessing the association between a measure of the self and a single dimension or indicator of functioning with peers.

The present study had two goals: (a) to assess whether self-perceived social competence has a single factor negative-to-positive structure or if it has a bifactorial structure with distinct positive and negative factors; and (b) to examine if these two factors were differentially associated with measures of acceptance and rejection.

METHODS AND MEASURES: Fifth- and sixth-grade girls and boys (N= 240, Mage = 11 years) representing more than 80% of the potential pool of participants, used a five-point scale to evaluate the extent to which they agreed with seven items that indexed either a positive view of one’s social competence (“I know how to get along well with others.”) or a negative view of one’s social competence (“I have trouble making friends.”). They also completed a rating-based sociometric measure that was used to create a measure of acceptance (i.e., how much each child was liked by peers) and rejection (i.e., how much the child was disliked by peers).

RESULTS: A bifactorial ESEM model which specified an overall latent factor along a positive/negative continuum and two smaller latent factors, one for positive and one for negative, was conducted with Mplus. Support was obtained for this hypothesized model. When the positive and negative latent factors were correlated with the acceptance and rejection scores, the positive factor was more strongly associated with acceptance (.62) than with rejection (.38, absolute value); acceptance was more strongly associated with the positive factor than the negative factor (.25); and the negative factor was as strongly associated with acceptance as it was with rejection (.18, absolute value).

CONCLUSION: Two important patterns are observed. First, we show that the social self concept has a two-factor structure with distinct positive and negative components. Second, the self is more strongly associated with acceptance than rejection. These findings show that the self needs to be assessed as a complex structure. As importantly, the self appears to be more strongly associated with positive experiences than with negative experiences.

Authors

• Lisa Astrologo, Concordia University
  Presenting Author

• Ryan Joshua Persram, Concordia University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Melisa Castellanos, Concordia University
  Non-Presenting Author

• William M. Bukowski, Concordia University
  Non-Presenting Author