[Self-evaluation maintenance processes in time sequential changes of relations between friend choice and school performance]

The purpose is to elucidate the sequential change in relations between students' friend choice and their school performance in terms of self-evaluation maintenance model. One hundred and thirty-five elementary school children and one hundred and twenty junior high school students were used as subjects of this survey. On the two questionnaires, each student was asked how he rated his own school performance, that of his friend, and that of his distant classmate, on both the high and low relevant subjects. According to the result of the survey, most students changed the combinations of each factor (relevance, closeness, school performance) in order to maintain their desirable self-evaluation. A time sequential analysis showed that students' self-evaluation maintenance processes were not so much based on their own ratings of school performance as on actual grades. It also showed that self-evaluation maintenance and personality traits were related to each other: As for elementary school children, their personality traits were related to the ratings of their own school performance and of their friends' school performance.