Determinants of young children's leadership and dominance strategies during play.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Determinants of young children's leadership and dominance behaviors during play with peers were explored in this study. Three levels of predictor variables were considered: (1) Individual: the child's age, gender, temperament, and language development, (2) Family: the child's birth order and number of siblings, and (3) Peer group: the amount of experience the child had with peers in daycare. Data were collected on 43 three- to six-year-olds who were recruited from two nationally accredited child care facilities. Data collection included parent ratings of children's temperament, an audiotaped sample of children's productive speech during play, teacher ratings of children's social and communicative competence in the classroom, and parent report of demographic information. Data collection also included pairing each child with a peer of the same gender and videotaping the children's semi-structured play interactions. Several peer interaction strategies were coded from the videotapes, including prosocial/helping behaviors, organizational leadership skills, imitation by a peer (indirect peer influence), physical aggression and verbal aggression.
Results of the study suggest that children's use of leadership and dominance strategies during play with peers depends on a complex variety of factors that include age, gender, individual temperament, language development, and months spent with peers in child care. In general, children display prosocial and organizational leadership more often than physical or verbal dominance when playing with their peers. The older preschoolers in the study used more physical and verbal aggression than the younger preschoolers. Older preschoolers also displayed more examples of organizational leadership during play. Girls used prosocial strategies and organizational leadership in their peer interactions more often than boys did, but there were no other differences in interaction strategies based on gender. At all ages, children's temperament, language development, and months spent with peers in child care predicted the types of strategies they used when trying to influence their peers during play. Discriminant function results indicated that if one knew a child's age, gender, temperament, level of language development, and time spent in child care, one could predict the profile of peer interaction strategies the child would use with 76.7% accuracy.