Adult Peer Research Articles

Projective measurement of adult peer relations as a function of chronological age.

The relationships between chronological age, year of measurement, cohort membership, education, and perception of horizontal peerships versus vertical different status associations are explored through a sample of 1,428 respondents randomly selected from two larger representative national samples of American men and women utilized in a 1957 study and in a replication of that study in 1976. Data are based upon a thematic apperception procedure in which stories projected by respondents are coded for perceptions of peerships and of status differences. Significant age changes in interpersonal preference are observed for both sexes; there is no evidence of cohort changes or interactive effects with year. Contributions are made to research involving adult peer relations as well as to theories concerned with role discontinuity and ego changes in adulthood.

The development of the concepts of masculinity and femininity in young children

Sex-role concepts in 140 children aged 3 to 7 were assessed by means of an instrument that allowed children to categorize attributes as being characteristic of males only, females only, both males and females, or nobody. The children sorted attributes once for adult peer stimulus figures and once for peer stimulus figures. The relationship of gender conservation to the degree of stereotyping of children's response was also investigated. The overlap children saw between characteristics of males and females increased with age over the age span studied. Girls were less sex-typed than boys, particularly those girls whose mothers were employed. Gender conservation was associated with decreased sex-typing. The tendency of children to assign positive attributes to their own sex and negative attributes to the other sex peaked at age 5. Subjects overall were less sex-typed in their views of adults than peers.

Second order effects of peers on mother-toddler interaction

The influence of adult and toddler peers on mother-toddler interaction was investigated in the natural home environment. Toddlers and mothers were observed in four circumstances on four different days: (1) at home by themselves; (2) with a toddler peer; (3) with an adult peer; and (4) with a toddler peer and an adult peer. In the presence of a toddler peer, toddlers made fewer instrumental and distal social bids to their mothers. Presence of an adult peer or mother without a toddler peer increased toddler tactile and proximal bids to mother. Maternal affect expression, both positive and negative, was intensified in the absence of the peers. Higher level reciprocal toddler peer play was more frequent in the absence of the adult peer. These findings were interpreted in terms of different types of second order effects.

The Adult Inhibition and Peer Disinhibition of Preschool Group Play

The Adult Inhibition and Peer Disinhibition of Preschool Group Play

Role-Taking and Social Orientation in Young Children

Summary Forty-four preschoolers were tested for spatial and conceptual role-taking ability and were observed for social behaviors during free play. Measures were correlated, and results showed that all absolute and relative measures of preference for adults as social objects were negatively related to spatial role-taking tasks. Relative measures for peer preference were positively related to spatial role-taking ability, but absolute measures of peer interaction were unrelated. Chronological age did not mediate these relationships. Results were interpreted as further evidence for the link between social behavior and social cognition. Results also indicated three factors for social behavior: Adult Orientation, Group Orientation, and Peer Interaction. Measures of adult preference were negatively related to those of child interaction, suggesting somewhat mutually exclusive object preferences at this age.

The Resistance to Temptation

Using children from American and Asian-Indian populations, I assessed the hypothesis that exposure to conforming or deviant models in a resistance to temptation situation would have significantly less deviating effect on Indian subjects. The rationale employed was that certain cultures provide an early impetus for self-discipline. Subjects were given an immediate resistance to deviation test with a forbidden toy. As hypothesized, exposure to a deviant model resulted in significantly greater deviation in latency, frequency, and duration of deviation among the American subjects, and exposure to a resisting model decreased frequency and duration of deviation in the Indian subjects. There was no significant difference between the samples in subjects' recollection of experimenter's instructions. The findings were discussed in terms of the differing influence of adult authority and peer interactions in the two cultures.

An Initial Investigation of the Relationship between Syntactical Divergency and the Listening Comprehension of Black Children

TO DETERMINE THE RELATIONSHIPS between measures of oral language production and measures of listening skill, 2 groups, each with 48 black pupils, were randomly selected from the third grades in 2 schools. One was a lower class (Title I) school and the second a low middle class (Non-Title I) school. The subjects in each school were randomly assigned to 3 subgroups of 16 each. A black and a white adult male educator and several black peers administered the measures. For the combined sample, all correlations were significant at the .05 level. A Neuman-Keuls test applied post hoc to the means for the 3 testers revealed that the black adult tester elicited significantly more divergent English than either the white adult tester (q = 2.98, p < .05) or the black peer testers (q = 3.88, p<.05). The results of the 6 Bonferroni tests on total word production indicated that the testers were homogeneous within the Non-Title I school, but that the black adult and black peer testers elicited significantly more words (p < .01) within the Title I school than did the white adult tester.