Letter from the Editors
Preface
- In Between the Images: The Therapeutic Benefits of Unconscious Exposure
- A Call for the Proper Evaluation of Treatment for Co-Occuring BD and SUD
- A Meta-Analysis on Father Involvement and Early Childhood Social-Emotional Development
- Loneliness and Depression among Foster Children: The Role of Caregiver Ethnic Match
- Father Involvement in Ethnically Diverse Populations
- Book Reading Styles in Bilingual Head Start Classrooms
- Demographic and Relational Predictors of Social Self-Awareness in Urban Elementary Classrooms
- Language Attitudes of Puerto Ricans Toward English and Bilingualism
- The Stories Friends Share: Structural and Thematic Analyses
Neha Sahu
Elementary school classroom interactions with peers and individual student social competence are important to children’s success in school. A key component of social competence is social self-awareness – awareness of one’s own behaviors in social interactions. Research has focused on the intra-individual processes predicting social self-awareness. However, as children grow older, peers become increasingly influential in their social development. This study moves beyond the individual, examining the primary peer environment in middle childhood as it relates to social self-awareness. Using social network and peer sociometric methods, the study examined the level of congruence between self-and peer-nominations of prosocial and aggressive behaviors (social self-awareness) as predicted by individual-level social factors (peer network centrality) over and above demographic factors (age and gender). Participants included 418 2nd to 4th grade African-American students facing heightened risk for school disengagement and social problems, from 33 classrooms in 5 Chicago elementary schools, located in high poverty urban neighborhoods. Analyses revealed that increasing age and network centrality predicted increasing levels of social self-awareness. Contrary to expectations, gender normative social behaviors failed to match predictions. Discussion focused on how social contexts facilitate or inhibit internal processes (Bronfenbrennerian approach). Future studies should examine classroom-level predictors, beyond individual-level predictors.