Communicative correlates of peer acceptance in childhood

Abstract

Although many studies have found several distinct types of communication skills associated with peer acceptance, few studies have included assessments of multiple communication skills in the effort to determine which skill or set of skills is most related to peer status. Significant associations between different types of comunication skill suggest that some of the reported relationships between peer acceptance and specific communication skills may be spurious. Consequently, the present research sought to determine which of several distinct communication skills is most related to peer status. Participants were 73 first‐ and third‐grade children. Groups of rejected, neglected, and accepted children were created on the basis of positive and negative peer nominations. Participants completed a persuasion task, a comforting task, a listener adaptation task, and three referential communication tasks. Accepted children performed significantly better on the comforting task and one of the referential tasks, and marginally better on the persuasion task. A stepwise discriminant analysis indicated that comforting skill was the best predictor of peer reputation; however, one measure of referential skill also contributed to the prediction of peer status. Implications of these results .for intervention efforts and future research are discussed.