Examines videotaped excerpts of treatment sessions from an intervention study to explore the changes occurring during social skills training and their relation to treatment outcome. Children who received social skills training displayed more conversational skills and received more positive peer support than children who were not coached.…

Current conceptual and empirical advances in appreciation of normal patterns of friendship development are reviewed and integrated for insight into the meaning of social competence for young special needs children. Questions are posed for researchers as well as for practitioners seeking to enhance the social effectiveness of special needs…

Sex cleavages in toddler and preschool peer groups were investigated in two studies. In the first study, playmate preferences and initiations and responses to friends were examined during the free play of toddlers in day care centers. In the second study, cross-sex friendships in toddlers and preschool children were examined. (PCB)

Grounding their efforts on results of previous research, investigators have sought to improve peer relationships of unpopular children through direct instruction in social skills. Generally, such interventions have been effective in promoting specific outcomes. For example, skill-training programs improve children's ability to form colleague…

Normally developing and mildly developmentally delayed preschool-age boys were brought together to form playgroups. Videotapes of the groups and peer sociometric ratings indicated that delayed children had a deficit in peer-related social interactions and were seen as less competent and of lower social status by peers. (PCB)

A script fading procedure was effectively used to teach 4 children (ages 9 and 12) with autism to initiate interactions with peers. Increased initiations (to within normal levels) generalized to a different setting, and for three of the children were maintained at two-month follow-up. (Author/DB)

Reviewed is research that describes how forms and features of child care systems can influence the development of social competency with peers during the infancy to preschool periods. Interactions between child care and familial systems in influencing social competency with peers are also examined.

Investigates whether unpopular children exhibit a bossy interpersonal style in a problem-solving situation. A detailed sequential category coding system was constructed and focused on patterns of influence among children. Sociometric measures were used to pair 44 third- and fourth-grade children into 22 dyads containing an average-status child and…

Participant observation was used to examine the social-communicative interactions of six preschool students with mild to severe handicaps, during free play and semistructured activities. Results revealed that each child displayed a consistent set of initiations; each child used augmentative strategies to continue interactions; and initiation…

Sixteen children with developmental disabilities and 32 nondisabled children (all between 1.5 and 4.5 years of age) were placed in either a same- or mixed-age grouping of 6 children. Observation six months later showed that children in mixed-age groups took more conversational turns with partners with disabilities than did children in same-age…

A student attitude questionnaire was given to 1,465 gifted and talented adolescents who identified 5 strategies used to deal with potentially stigmatizing events (cover up, lie, placate, be truthful, and cop-out). The placate coping strategy was the most frequently used across scenarios. (DB)

Investigated the relationship between parents' efforts to initiate and monitor children's peer contacts and the qualities of children's peer relations in nonschool and school settings. (PCB)

Examines the correlations among measures of social cognition, social competence, and naturalistic social behaviors of 23 kindergartners. Negative or aggressive comments were significantly related to performance on the test of social cognition. Rating scales completed by the teacher emerged as the most accurate gauges of observed social behaviors.…

The Taxonomy of Problematic Social Situations for Children (TOPS) was completed for 30 fifth-grade children on 2 occasions 8 weeks apart. The TOPS total and factor scores were found to be highly temporally stable and convergent with peer evaluations administered concurrently, with the exception of peer "like most" nominations.…

Evaluation of two meta-analyses of sociometric research on children with learning disabilities notes differences in their findings. Differences are attributed to effects of gender, ethnicity, and type of measurement on effect size; inadequate reporting of coding reliability; failure to include similar articles for analysis; and poor…