Age-mate acceptance and indices of peer status.

Abstract

Being accepted by, being peripheral to, or being rejected by age-mates has an impact upon children and adolescents.. The concomitants of acceptance appear to be a significant source of variation in learning, in role behavior, and in several aspects of personality formation. Each young person modifies his need-dispositions (3, pp. 8-o10, 9-98, 114-120) and ego-involvements (5, PP. 92-153) with others, his adaptive anxiety and value-orientations, according to the nature and extent of his experiences with those about his own age. In other words, motivations underlying behavior-overt and covert-are shaped in the age-mate context as well as in the family and in local adult-controlled institutions such as the school and the church. Indices are constructs which represent some essential part of a reality that we wish to approximate for analytical purposes. Generally speaking, concepts are clarified and become a part of day-to-day research when indices are established for the variables being considered (i, p. 1o9). An index of peer status is merely a mathematical construct which attempts to represent a boy's or girl's level of acceptance among age-mates. The acceptance, in turn, is an observable fact which symbolizes aspects of learning and motivation which escape us. We substitute the pooled judgments of others for more detailed, time-consuming clinical appraisals. The working hypothesis is that one's socialization and motivational orientations are similar, in certain essential respects, to those of other people of approximately the same status.2 Two indices of peer status are to be explained and illustrated. Each has been tested in a preliminary way as an operational construct in research to be reported. Our purpose in the present paper, however, is to describe the derivation of the two measures and to show how they have been employed in studying young people and their groupings. Data demonstrating reliability and validity, other than agreement among procedures, as well as relationships to other variables, are to be presented in subsequent accounts of investigations.