New Directions in Peer Nomination Methodology E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: J-B CAD Single Issue Child & Adolescent Development
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 167

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Peer nominations provide a key method for assessing relationships, social status, andinterpersonal behavior. Taking an in-depth look at current practices and recent advances in peer nomination methodology, this volume presents: * a history of peer nomination methods, with a focus on the early origins of peer informant measuresand the nature of Moreno s (1934) sociometric methodology (highlighting fundamental differences from the modern sociometric procedure). * an overview of the major changes that have occurred in peer nomination research over the course of the past 2 decades, including the recent focus on popularity and relational aggression, statistical advances, logistical challenges and innovations, and the changing conventions of the nomination procedure itself. This is the 157th volume in this Jossey-Bass series New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. Its mission is to provide scientific and scholarly presentations on cutting edge issues and concepts in this subject area. Each volume focuses on a specific new direction or research topic and is edited by experts from that field.

Leseprobe

New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development

Elena L.Grigorenko EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

William Damon FOUNDING EDITOR

New Directions in Peer Nomination Methodology

Peter E. L. Marks Antonius H. N. Cillessen EDITORS

Number 157 • Fall 2017

Jossey-Bass

San Francisco

New Directions in Peer Nomination Methodology

Peter E. L. Marks and Antonius H. N. Cillessen (Eds.)

New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, no. 157

Editor-in-Chief: Elena L. Grigorenko

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Elena L. Grigorenko, Editor-in-Chief

University of Houston, TX

Editorial Board

Baptiste Barbot, PhD Pace University, USA

David D. Preiss, PhD Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile

Linda Jarvin, PhD Paris College of Art, France

Peggy McCardle, PhD, MPH Peggy McCardle Consulting, LLC, USA

Fumiko Hoeft, MD, PhD University of California San Francisco, USA

Jens F. Beckmann, Dr. rer. nat. Durham University, UK

CONTENTS

Introduction to the Special Issue: 20th-Century Origins and 21st-Century Developments of Peer Nomination Methodology

A Brief History of Peer Nominations

Peer Nomination Research During the Past 2 Decades

The Current Issue

References

1: Methodological Choices in Peer Nomination Research

Introduction and Background

Specific Methodological Choices

Open Questions and Challenges

Assessment and Reporting of Psychometric Properties

Conclusion

References

2: Logistical Challenges and Opportunities for Conducting Peer Nomination Research in Schools

Building Research Relationships from the Ground Up

Challenges, Obstacles, and Suggested Solutions

Conclusions

References

3: Computer-Based Methods for Collecting Peer Nomination Data: Utility, Practice, and Empirical Support

Advantages and Limitations of Computer-Based Assessments

Basic Procedure and Requirements: Practical Recommendations and Considerations

Reliability and Validity

Future Directions and Challenges

References

4: The Current Status of Peer Assessment Techniques and Sociometric Methods

Purposes, Procedures, Paradigms, and Progress

What Else and Where to Go?

Acknowledgements

References

Order Form

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Chapter 01

Table 1.1

Table 1.2

Chapter 02

Table 2.1

List of Illustrations

Chapter 03

Figure 3.1 Computer screen presentation of sociometric question, classroom roster, and choices made (in lightface print).

Figure 3.2 Computer presentation of classroom roster (left) and nominees (right).

Figure 3.3 Computer presentation of peer rating procedure.

Guide

Cover

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Marks, P. E. L. (2017). Introduction to the special issue: 20th-century origins and 21st-century developments of peer nomination methodology. In Peter E. L. Marks & Antonius H. N. Cillessen (Eds.), New Directions in Peer Nomination Methodology. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 157, 7–19.

Introduction to the Special Issue: 20th-Century Origins and 21st-Century Developments of Peer Nomination Methodology

Peter E. L. Marks

Abstract

This issue of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development looks at current practices and recent advances in peer nomination methodology. Peer nominations provide a key method for assessing relationships, social status, and interpersonal behavior. This introductory article begins with a history of peer nomination methods, with a focus on the early origins of peer informant measures and the nature of Moreno's (1934) sociometric methodology (highlighting fundamental differences from the modern sociometric procedure). Next, the article addresses major changes that have occurred in peer nomination research over the course of the past 2 decades, including the recent focus on popularity and relational aggression, statistical advances, logistical challenges and innovations, and the changing conventions of the nomination procedure itself. The final section includes a brief overview of the articles included in this issue. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

For nearly a century, developmental researchers have used peer nominations as a central method for assessing peer relationships among children and adolescents. Peer nominations have been used at the forefront of research on friendships, social groups, social status, and social behavior. They have been used to establish the benefits of friendship and acceptance, the threats of isolation and rejection, and the causes and consequences of aggression and prosocial behavior. They have helped to establish the continuity of social adjustment and internal working models over the course of development, measuring aspects of peer relationships that have been linked to both parenting and adaptive romantic relationships.

Peer nomination research has been in a constant state of development since its inception. Foci, methodological conventions, and theoretical orientations change, and new methodological analyses and statistical approaches emerge. In this issue of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, each of the primary articles provides a unique perspective on both the current state and the current direction of the field. In this introductory article, however, I set the stage by providing a historical perspective on peer nomination methods (with an emphasis on their inception), leading to an analysis of some of the major changes and developments that the field has undergone in the early years of the 21st century.

A Brief History of Peer Nominations

The history of research using peer nominations is as rich as the history of any methodology within the social sciences, and dates back nearly as far as the establishment of psychology and sociology as academic disciplines. Indeed, understanding the history of peer nomination methodologies provides the best context from which to understand current trends and recent advances.

Precursors and Early Origins

Although peer nomination methodologies are typically traced back to Moreno (1934) or Hartshorne and May (1929), the foundations of peer-informant methods were laid decades earlier with research on peer ratings. In 1903, one of the founders of modern psychology, James Cattell, assessed the traits of five “men of science” using ratings from 12 acquaintances each. Noting the promise of Cattell's procedure, Norsworthy (1908) asked members of a sorority to rate each other on a list of the same traits and specifically analyzed the amount of consensus in their ratings.

By the following decade, there was active research on the assessment of character traits in both industry and education, and several measures were designed that could assess employees or teachers based on responses of either supervisors or well-acquainted colleagues (Monroe & Clark, 1924). Studies using undergraduate peer ratings were also conducted by personality researchers (Folsom, 1917) and vocational psychologists (Hollingsworth, 1916). Additionally, the U.S. military became interested in the efficiency and effectiveness of officers at the outset of the First World War, and researchers Walter Dill Scott and Harold Rugg were employed to adapt and study the “man-to-man” scale (Monroe & Clark, 1924), which was completed by both supervisors and fellow officers (Rugg, 1921). Based on his research in the military and with teachers, Rugg ultimately concluded that the conditions for accurately and reliably rating human character were nearly impossible to maintain.

Despite the pessimism of Rugg (1921) and others (see Hollingsworth, 1916), peer-based investigations expanded in the 1920s. Although much of this work continued to focus on skills and personality characteristics, researchers were beginning to use peer reports to assess personal feelings, relationships, and status, and studies using peer nominations (as opposed to ratings) were first published. For example, Perrin (1921) asked college students to name others based on “degree of personal affection,” Almack (1922) asked fourth through seventh graders to name peers with whom they would like to work or whom they would like to invite to a party, Dexter (1926) asked undergraduate women to identify their most popular peers, Hsia (1928) assessed “best mixers” among early adolescents, and Furfey (1927) analyzed reciprocated choices derived from asking boys to nominate peers with whom they liked to play. In many ways, these studies of interpersonal affection and relationships in the 1920s prefaced the shift in the use of peer reports in psychological, sociological, and educational contexts away from general personality assessment and toward assessment of interpersonal behaviors (Hartshorne & May, 1929) and relationships/groupings (Moreno, 1934).

Codifying Peer Nomination Methods: Sociometry and the Guess Who Test

The 1934 publication of Jacob L. Moreno's Who Shall Survive? revolutionized peer relationship research by introducing the subfield of sociometry. Although previous researchers had made use of peer nominations, Moreno's work codified and popularized the theoretical framework and research methodology for studying group structures.

The cornerstone of Moreno's sociometric method involved asking participants to nominate peers within a given social group on the basis of preference. Two foundational aspects of Moreno's method, however, distinguish it from modern peer relationships research. The first is that subjects were asked to nominate peers based on their desires to engage with those peers in a particular way; that is, rather than simply being asked whom they liked or disliked, participants would be asked with whom they wanted to work, or live, or eat, and so on. The second is that nominations were actually used to restructure the group in terms of the criterion for a given question; for example, peer nominations would be used to determine who sat next to whom during lunchtime, roommate arrangements within a sorority, and so on. These two aspects of Moreno's method were, according to Moreno and his followers, requirements of the sociometric methodology; studies that did not involve these methodological features (e.g., studies that simply asked participants to list their friends or the peers they most liked) were considered “quasi-sociometric” or “near-sociometric” (Lindzey & Borgatta, 1954; Polansky, Lippitt, & Redl, 1950). Early sociometrists argued that the physical reorganization of group arrangements provided for both the reliability and validity of the nominations themselves. Harmon (1949), for example, argued that assessing the reliability and validity of sociometric nominations was as useless as doing so for votes in a public election, saying that “in psychometrics, the data are almost always measurements of a sample of behavior; in sociometry, by contrast, the data are almost always directly descriptive of the universe itself” (p. 747).

Despite the historical influence of Moreno's framework and methodology, modern peer relationships researchers utilize peer nomination methods that are similar to Moreno's method only insofar as they ask individuals to name peers who fit specific criteria. After the 1930s and 1940s, researchers rarely reorganized group structures based on concrete nominations, and even asking about concrete arrangements gradually gave way to general questions about liking and friendships by the 1980s (Hartup, 1983).

In fact, modern peer nomination methods seem to more closely resemble those proposed by Hartshorne and May in 1929 than those proposed by Moreno 5 years later. Hartshorne and May established the methodology of the “Guess Who Test,” which provided a number of behavioral descriptions and asked children to write the names of peers who fit each description. Although the wordings of some questions are dated, others are remarkably similar to peer nomination items used today (e.g., “This one is always picking on others and annoying them”; “Here is someone who will always stop what he is doing to help a fellow pupil”; Hartshorne & May, 1929, p. 88). Variations of the Guess Who Test were widely used in later decades (often paired with separate “sociometric” questions to assess group structure and affective reactions) and direct descendants of the measure are still in use today (e.g., in the Revised Class Play; Masten, Morison, & Pellegrini, 1985).

The Latter Half of the 20th Century

Much of the peer nomination research between the late 1930s and the early 1950s was based on assessing correlates of peer acceptance and peer rejection/social isolation (Hallinan, 1981). Researchers determined that individuals who were accepted by the peer group tended to have positive characteristics and strong social skills, whereas individuals who were rejected tended to have negative characteristics and weak social skills. In general, these studies were atheoretical and the relative consistency and straightforwardness of these findings failed to stimulate subsequent research (see Hallinan, 1981), which may have contributed to the dearth of psychological peer nomination research through the 1960s (Hartup, 1983).1 The field was revitalized in the 1970s, however, with an explosion of research on friendships and group structures (Hallinan, 1981; Hartup, 1983).

After the renewed interest in peer relationships in the 1970s, the following decade saw the popularization of three conceptual and analytical innovations exemplified by the publication of Coie, Dodge, and Coppotelli (1982): the consideration of acceptance and rejection as two separate dimensions of peer reactions, the combination of acceptance and rejection scores to form social preference (liking − disliking) and social impact (liking + disliking) scores, and the categorization of individuals into distinct “sociometric status groups” based on levels of preference and impact.2 The Coie et al. (1982) model of group classification was widely used by developmental psychologists during the 1980s and 1990s and is still used by some researchers today (although less widely, due to the development of the field as discussed later). Using Coie et al.’s framework as a starting point, researchers focused primarily on the study of peer rejection and victimization into the late 1990s (Cillessen & Marks, 2011; see Bierman, 2004, for a review).

A Century of Research, a Century of Debate: Lingering Methodological Questions

Looking at the history of peer informant measures generally, and peer nominations in particular, it is striking to see the longevity of some of the methodological questions that we are still asking today, as well as the sophistication with which those questions were addressed.

Questions about the reliability and validity of peer informant measures, for example, are now over a century old (Hollingsworth, 1916; Rugg, 1921). Although a number of researchers analyzed the reliability and validity of peer nomination measures during the 1940s and 1950s (see Gronlund, 1959, for a review), a consensus seemed to emerge thereafter that assessment of internal reliability was unnecessary in peer nomination research and that nominations were primarily validated through face validity (Lindzey & Borgatta, 1954). Today, researchers are still debating the proper assessment of reliability and validity in peer nomination research (e.g., Marks, Babcock, Cillessen, & Crick, 2013; Terry, 2000).

Since at least the 1930s, researchers have questioned the appropriate use of positive and negative nominations and whether positive and negative nominations should be combined (Coie et al., 1982; Lemann & Solomon, 1952; Myers, 1934). Beyond research on social preference, this discussion is currently playing out in the popularity literature regarding the construct of unpopularity (Cillessen & Marks, 2011; Gorman, Schwartz, Nakamoto, & McKay, 2007).