Abstract
Friendships have important influences on children's well-being and future adjustment, and interpersonal forgiveness has been suggested as a crucial means for children to maintain friendships. However, existing measures of preadolescent children's forgiveness are restricted by developmental limitations to reporting emotional responses via questionnaire and inconsistent interpretations of the term “forgive.” This paper describes development and testing of concurrent and discriminant validity of a pictorial measure of children's emotional forgiveness, the Children's Forgiveness Card Set (CFCS). In Study 1, 148 Australian children aged 8–13 years (M = 10.54, SD = 1.35) responded to a hypothetical transgression in which apology was manipulated and completed the CFCS and extant measures of forgiveness and socially desirable responding. Following an exploratory factor analysis to clarify the structure of the CFCS, the CFCS correlated moderately with other forgiveness measures and did not correlate with socially desirable responding. Apology predicted CFCS responding among older children. In Study 2 an exploratory factor analysis broadly replicated the structure of the CFCS among a sample of N = 198 North American children aged 5–14 years (M = 9.39 years, SD = 1.67). We also fitted an exploratory bi-factor model to the Study 2 data which clarified which cards best measured general forgiveness, or positive or hostile aspects of responding to transgressions. Apology once again predicted the CFCS, this time regardless of age. The CFCS appears a potentially valid measure of children's emotional forgiveness. Potential applications and differences between explicit and latent forgiveness in children are discussed.
Highlights
Childhood is recognized as a crucial time for the development of positive attributes such as social competence and self-esteem, and relationships with peers are regarded as important influences on such development, as well as being valued by the child (e.g., Bagwell et al, 1998)
Variables and Manipulation Checks Because severity is a key predictor of forgiveness that may impact on the effectiveness of apologies (Fehr and Gelfand, 2010), perceived severity of the transgression was assessed as a potential covariate using a single item, “How bad is what happened in the story?” Response options were “not bad at all”, “a bit bad”, and “really bad”
Exploratory Bi-Factor Analysis An exploratory bi-factor analysis (EBFA) model was fitted in MPlus v8.1 (Muthén and Muthén, 2018) and Table 4 shows the results
Summary
Childhood is recognized as a crucial time for the development of positive attributes such as social competence and self-esteem, and relationships with peers are regarded as important influences on such development, as well as being valued by the child (e.g., Bagwell et al, 1998). The Children’s Forgiveness Card Set. One recognized way of resolving conflict and maintaining valued relationships is through interpersonal forgiveness (McCullough, 2008). Variables and Manipulation Checks Because severity is a key predictor of forgiveness that may impact on the effectiveness of apologies (Fehr and Gelfand, 2010), perceived severity of the transgression was assessed as a potential covariate using a single item, “How bad is what happened in the story?” Response options (accompanied by illustrations) were “not bad at all” (happy face), “a bit bad” (slightly unhappy face), and “really bad” (very unhappy face). The distance from the left anchor at which children marked the centimeter line ( effectively an point scale from 0 to 10) was measured; negative cards were reverse-scored by subtracting this distance from 10 meaning higher values represented more forgiving responses regardless of whether the card was positive or negative; scores were summed to produce the Line Task score
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