Children's Social Desirability Response Tendencies and Wechsler Comprehension and Picture Arrangement Performance

Abstract

The Children's Social Desirability Scale (3) consists of items representing behaviors and attitudes which are either culturally sanctioned and approved but occur infrequently, or are culturally disapproved but occur frequently. Approval-motivation has been inferred from the degree to which an individual endorses questionnaire items describing himself on a conrinuum of desirability as opposed to their manifest concent. While high approval-motivation has been shown to be related to conformity to perceived social-situational demands (4. 5), Brannigan, Duchnowski, and Nyce (2) have suggested that for young children this response tendency may also reflect heightened sensitivity and competence in situations. To test this hypothesis 109 boys and 113 girls from the first, third and fifth grades of a public elementary school were administered the Children's Social Desirability Scale in rheir homerooms and individually administered the WISC Comprehens~on and Picture Arrangement subtests. The WISC subtests have been characterized as verbal and nonverbal measures of social competence respectively ( 1 ). Separate product-moment cor