The Effect of Helping Behaviors on Adolescents’ Development of Social Relationships

• In Event: Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Topic - Social Relationships

Abstract

This study aims to investigate adolescents’ social development after participating in an instructional intervention featuring a peer-led, open format collaborative discussion called Collaborative Reasoning (CR; Anderson, Chinn, Waggoner, & Nguyen-Jahiel,1998). Specifically, we attempt to answer two research questions: 1) Does CR promote adolescents’ development of social relationships? 2) If so, are there social processes that increase the likelihood of students developing new social ties with classmates during the discussion?

The data included 474 seventh graders from eight classes in a rural middle school in north China. Four classes were randomly selected to participate in CR discussions, while the remaining four classes took regular teacher-directed Chinese reading instruction. A target group was randomly selected from each CR class to be video-recorded throughout the intervention. Students filled out a sociometric questionnaire before and after the intervention to indicate which person they liked to play with at school, along with a ranking of all the friends they nominated.

Our first hypothesis is that adolescents who had CR discussions are likely to develop more social relationships with classmates as compared to control students who received direct instruction. Our second hypothesis is that peer assistance during collaborative discussions may be the reason why students develop more social ties. The premise is that giving or receiving help from peers might boost the deconstruction of previously formed social structures and introduce new social ties to the system, which in turn lead to the development of social relationships.

So far, we have completed a network-level analysis to compare the change of classroom friendship networks for each class before and after the intervention (see Figure 1). The results showed that students in CR classes formed significantly more social ties across different clusters than control classes. To understand the underlying mechanism, we created a coding scheme (see Table 1) to identify both verbal and non-verbal helping behaviors during the collaborative discussion, which included four types: emotional support, cognitive support, behavioral support, and discussion-facilitating behaviors. We expect to complete the coding for 32 discussion videos by the end of this year. After that we will conduct a microgenetic analysis to examine the possible snowballing of helping behaviors from the first discussion to the last discussion for each target group and compare the developmental pattern between students who build more social ties with those who showed little change in social relationships. We will also perform a mediation analysis to examine the effect of helping behaviors on the change of social relationships.

This study is expected to enrich the current literature by revealing the effect of positive peer interactions on adolescents’ social development, as compared to studies that focus on peer influence on the spread of negative behaviors such as substance use or suicidal behavior (Stotsky, Bowker, & Etkin, 2020). The microgenetic analysis of adolescents’ helping behaviors in an authentic social setting opens a new frontier in child development research. The positive effects of CR would motivate educators to implement collaborative group work in secondary classrooms to promote adolescents’ development of social relationships.

Authors

• Shufeng Ma, East China Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Senyu Chen, University of Manchester
  Non-Presenting Author