Poster #223 - Children’s Connectedness with Siblings and Friends during Play from Early to Middle Childhood

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Social Relationships

Integrative Statement

Children’s relationships with other children are identified as crucial contexts for their social, cognitive, and emotional development (Carpendale & Lewis, 2015; Howe et al., 2011; Piaget, 1962; Vygotsky, 1976). During early and middle childhood, children spend much of their time engaged in social play, which requires partners to negotiate, collaborate, and take the other’s perspective to maintain and further their shared activity (Brown et al., 1996; Göncü, 1993; Howe et al., 2005). Children’s most frequent play partners include siblings, friends, and peers (Howe & Leach, 2018; Lehrer et al., 2014). During social play, children need to establish and maintain connectedness; meaning, they need to coordinate their ongoing social interactions and communicate and share ideas effectively to establish a shared understanding of the pretend scenario (Ensor & Hughes, 2008; Howe et al., 2005). The purpose of our study was to investigate children’s connectedness during play with a sibling and friend from early to middle childhood.
At T1, each sibling dyad included a 4.5 year-old focal child (N = 65) observed with a younger (n = 37) or older sibling (n = 28). Families also selected a same-aged friend of the focal child’s to participate. At T2 (approximately three years later), 46 families participated. Each dyad was observed in the family home in two separate play sessions and was given one of three counterbalanced play sets (farm, village, or train set). Data were coded for connectedness in communication: (a) initiation-connected (i.e., child initiates communication, which leads to the partner making a connected statement); (b) initiation-end (i.e., child initiates communication, but fails to elicit a response from their partner.); (c) connected-sustained (i.e., child’s statement is connected to the partner’s previous statement and sustains the interaction); (d) connected-end (i.e., child’s statement is connected to the partner’s previous statement, but fails to elicit a semantically related response from the partner); (e) self-talk (i.e., speech directed at oneself); and (f) unclear (i.e., inaudible vocalizations).
A relationship x time MANOVA with the six connectedness codes as the dependent variables was conducted. The analysis revealed multivariate effects for time, Wilk’s λ = .66, F(5, 38) = 3.20, p = .012, ηp2 = .34, and multivariate effects for relationship, Wilk’s λ = .47, F(5, 38) = 7.17, p < .001, ηp2 = .53. Regarding time effects, children made more initiation-end and connected-end statements at T2 than T1 and self-talk and unclear statements occurred more often at T1 than T2 (see Table 1 for Ms and SEs). Regarding relationship effects, children made more initiated-end and self-talk statements with siblings than with friends and more connected-sustained statements with friends than siblings.
The findings presented contribute to our understanding of developmental and relationship differences in children’s connectedness during play and provide a means to illuminate their social understanding as they navigate between two important relationships in their young lives. Our findings support the notion that connectedness reflects aspects of the relationship and social coordination (Fogel, 1993; Harrist & Waugh, 2002) and reveals changes in children’s connectedness from early to middle childhood.

Authors

• Jamie Leach, Concordia University
  Presenting Author

• Nina Howe, Concordia University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ganie B. DeHart, SUNY Geneseo
  Non-Presenting Author