Abstract
Classroom social networks are influential to young children’s cognitive, social–emotional, and language development, but assessment and analyses of social networks are complex. Findings have been mixed regarding whether different informants (teachers, children, researchers) are congruent in perceiving classroom social networks. There is also a lack of discussion about the roles of network transformation (converting value networks into binary networks), a required data step for widely used statistical network analyses. This study addressed these issues based on network data of 16 preschool children containing 240 potential dyadic interactions collected from teacher ratings, child nominations, and researcher observations across 44 observation cycles over four school days. Results showed that the three informants were congruent in perceiving the classroom social network, whereas the level of congruency between the teacher-report and the researcher-report networks was the highest. Binary transformation of social networks tended to decrease the level of congruency across informants, although the level of congruency tended to be higher when more stringent binary transformation thresholds were selected.
Highlights
Classroom social networks refer to how children connect with each other within the classroom, which have been used to infer how educational and social resources are distributed or shared among children (Moll et al, 1993; Farmer and Rodkin, 1996)
We calculated the proportions of present social ties from each of the binary transformed classroom social networks
We examined how network assessment and network analysis influenced our understanding of classroom social networks
Summary
Classroom social networks refer to how children connect with each other within the classroom, which have been used to infer how educational and social resources are distributed or shared among children (Moll et al, 1993; Farmer and Rodkin, 1996). Classroom social networks have gained increasing attention in the field of early childhood education since they represent children’s social experiences; are predictive of their cognitive, social–emotional, and language development; and are associated with children’s school readiness and well-being (e.g., Schaefer et al, 2010; Eggum-Wilkens et al, 2014; Delay et al, 2016). Common approaches to assessing classroom social networks include peer nominations (Parkhurst and Asher, 1992), teacher ratings (Lin et al, 2016), and researcher observations (Martin and Fabes, 2001). Most of the existing studies focused on comparing teacher- and child-perceived classroom social networks
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