Peer assessment of the social behavior of accepted, rejected, and neglected children

Positive and negative sociometric nominations were used with second and fifth-grade children to select 26 socially accepted, 32 rejected, and 28 neglected children. A total of 358 of their classmates evaluated these children by indicating whether each of 19 descriptions of social behavior was characteristic of each child. Rejected children were perceived by their peers as being more aggressive, disruptive, irritable, domineering , dishonest , and selfish than accepted and/or neglected children. Neglected children, in contrast, differed from accepted children only in being less likely to brag about physical prowess . While the low sociometric status of rejected children appears to be related to the negative impact of their behavior on peers, this does not appear to be the case for neglected children. Females were generally perceived as behaving more positively with peers, but no interactions were found between sex and sociometric status. In general, the test-retest reliability of peer evaluation items was higher for fifth- than for second-grade children, but significant grade by sociometric status interactions were found for only two items.