Evaluation of a multi-component and multi-agent intervention to improve classroom social relationships among early elementary school-age children.

We present the preliminary evaluation of a comprehensive, multi-component and multi-agent 2-year classroom intervention to enhance children's relationships with their peers and teachers among early elementary school students in Spain. The intervention contained universal components directed to the whole class plus targeted components for children with peer problems. Using a quasi-experimental design, 229 children (in 10 classrooms) formed a comparison group whose teachers engaged in their typical practices, followed the next year by 214 children (in 9 classrooms) who received the intervention.

Interpersonal Perceptions of Adverse Peer Experiences in First-Grade Students.

The aim of this study was to identify which adverse peer experiences better predict perceived negative peer relationships among elementary school first graders according to sex. The peer experiences examined were peer rejection, peer victimization, and mutual antipathy; the interpersonal perceptions studied were perceived peer victimization, dyadic meta-perception of peer disliking, and loneliness. The participants were 809 children ( = 6.

An Adjusted Probability Method for the Identification of Sociometric Status in Classrooms.

The aim of this study was to test the performance of an adjusted probability method for sociometric classification proposed by García Bacete (GB) in comparison with two previous methods. Specific goals were to examine the overall agreement between methods, the behavioral correlates of each sociometric group, the sources for discrepant classifications between methods, the behavioral profiles of discrepant and consistent cases between methods, and age differences. We compared the GB adjusted probability method with the standard score model proposed by Coie and Dodge (CD) and the probability score model proposed by Newcomb and Bukowski (NB).

Understanding Rejection between First-and-Second-Grade Elementary Students through Reasons Expressed by Rejecters.

The aim of this research was to obtain the views of young children regarding their reasons for rejecting a peer. To achieve this goal, we conducted a qualitative study in the context of theory building research using an analysis methodology based on Grounded Theory. The collected information was extracted through semi-structured individual interviews from a sample of 853 children aged 6 from 13 urban public schools in Spain.

Problematic Social Situations for Peer-Rejected Students in the First Year of Elementary School.

This study examined the social situations that are problematic for peer-rejected students in the first year of elementary school. For this purpose, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted on the Taxonomy of Problematic Social Situations for Children (TOPS, Dodge et al., 1985) in 169 rejected pupils, identified from a sample of 1457 first-grade students (ages 5-7) enrolled in 62 classrooms of elementary school.