Abstract
There has been a rapid growth of studies focused on selection and socialization processes of peer groups, mostly due to the development of stochastic actor-based models to analyze longitudinal social network data. One of the core assumptions of these models is that individuals have an accurate knowledge of the dyadic relationships within their network (i.e., who is and is not connected to whom). Recent cross-sectional findings suggest that elementary school children are very inaccurate in perceiving their classmates’ dyadic relationships. These findings question the validity of stochastic actor-based models to study the developmental dynamics of children and carry implications for future research as well as for the interpretation of past findings. The goal of the present study was thus to further explore the adequacy of the accuracy assumption, analysing data from three longitudinal samples of different age groups (elementary school children and adolescents). Our results support the validity of stochastic actor-based models to study the network of adolescents and suggest that the violation of the accuracy assumption for elementary school children is not as severe as previously thought.
Highlights
There is a long tradition in developmental research in studying the mechanisms that give rise to particular peer network structures and how they afford and constrain behavior
Endogenous processes determine how the structure of the Perception Accuracy of Affiliative Relationships network itself influences change, while exogenous processes determine how individual or dyadic characteristics influence change
In the older age sample (Sample 1) we found mean perception accuracy values to be much higher than those reported for elementary school children (Sample 1 mean k T0–T2 range = 0.64–0.69)
Summary
There is a long tradition in developmental research in studying the mechanisms that give rise to particular peer network structures (i.e., the enduring pattern of interpersonal relationships between children/adolescents within a specific setting, typically a school or a classroom) and how they afford and constrain behavior (for reviews see Vaughn and Santos, 2009; Santos and Vaughn, in press). The authors found a low agreement (Cohen’s k = 0.371; Cohen, 1960) between what children in their sample perceived to be two classmates who hanged out together and what “truly” happened (reciprocated self-reported hang out relationships were used as the criterion to identify “true relationships”; see more details on this operationalization below). These results led the authors to conclude that elementary school children are very inaccurate in correctly identifying with whom their classmates hang out with, and stochastic actor-based models may not be appropriate to analyze longitudinal social network data
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