1975/09/01 by John M. Gottman, Jonni Gonso, Brian Rasmussen · 2 citations
Psychology · #Behavioral and Psychological Studies #Bullying, Victimization, and Aggression #Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development #Competence (human resources) #Developmental psychology #Friendship #Observational study #Popularity #Population #Psychology #Set (abstract data type) #Social change #Social class #Social competence #Social psychology #Social relation #Social skills #Socioeconomic status #Sociometric status #Sociometry
paper · doi:10.2307/1128569
openalex publication_date 1975/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/19
The relationship between social skills, social interaction, and popularity was examined. The subjects were 198 children in third and fourth grades in middle- and low-income schools. The relationships between number of friends, socioeconomic status, and grade level were studied in a 2 times 2 times 2 factorial design with 2 sets of dependent measures: (1) social skills were assessed by an experimenter testing each child individually on a set of tasks which included measures of the ability to label emotions in facial expressions, knowledge of how to make friends, giving help, and role-taking ability; and (2) social interaction in the classroom was assessed using a naturalistic observational system. Popular and unpopular children differed in their knowledge of how to make friends and on the referential-communication task. In the classroom, popular children distributed and received more positive reinforcement than unpopular children and spent less time daydreaming. Both grade and social class factors were significant. However, different patterns of results contributed to the main effect of friends and the grade-level main effect. The importance of assessing social skills which are first validated by reference to a criterion such as sociometric position was noted.