Читать книгу The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development - Группа авторов - Страница 19

After a period of dormancy following World War II, research on children’s peer relations reemerged in the 1970s and expanded thereafter (Ladd, 2005). A key impetus was the premise that peer socialization prepared children to succeed in multiple spheres of life, including romantic and workplace relations.

Focal areas of inquiry included children’s peer interactions, relationships, and groups. Seminal work described the character of peer interactions and behavior (e.g., prosocial, aggressive, withdrawn) in varying social contexts (e.g., classrooms, playgrounds), explicated relationship processes and consequences (e.g., friendship formation, maintenance, termination, e.g., Parker & Seal, 1996; bully–victim dynamics, Veenstra et al., 2007), and probed the process by which children access and acquire status in peer groups (e.g., peer group entry, acceptance, rejection; Bukowski et al., 2018).

Evidence linking children’s behavior with the quality of their peer relationships led investigators to search for the origins of social “competencies” and skill “deficits” (Ladd, 2005). Among the determinants examined were the social‐cognitive underpinnings (Gifford‐Smith & Rabiner, 2004) and the parenting and family processes associated with children’s behavior amongst peers (Ladd & Kochenderfer‐Ladd, 2019).

Another key objective was to confirm and extend early longitudinal findings suggesting that the quality of children’s peer relations during childhood predicted their health and adjustment in adolescence and adulthood. A new wave of prospective longitudinal studies largely substantiated this premise. Childhood peer rejection, victimization, and friendlessness forecasted a variety of later‐life social difficulties and dysfunctions (Ladd, 2005).

Peer relations research eventually broadened to incorporate diverse ethnic and cultural contexts. Within North America, for example, researchers discovered that whereas Euro‐American children had more cross‐ethnic friendships than African‐American children (Kawabata & Crick, 2008), African‐American children had a larger number of friendships and more opposite‐sex friendships (Kovacs et al., 1996). Internationally, research on bullying that had originated in Norway spread to many other nations. Additionally, cross‐national comparisons were made of children’s friendships, peer group relations, social behavior, and interpersonal competencies (Chen et al. 2018).