The Peer Group as a Moderator of Associations between Individual Academic Achievement and Social Functioning
The significance of the group norm may be reflected more directly in its moderation of individual-level relations between academic achievement and social functioning. Although academic achievement is expected to be associated with social functioning (e.g., Chen et al., 1997), the strength of the associations may vary across groups. For groups that function on the basis of academic achievement as a major standard, children are likely to evaluate each other according to their attitudes and achievement in academic areas. At the same time, group members may be sensitive to the feedback from group peers on their academic performance. Within the group, children who perform better on academic subjects are more likely to receive social and emotional support from others and have more opportunities to learn from others. However, children who are relatively weak in academic achievement may not benefit so much from group interactions.
Academic achievement may have different meanings for groups in which members are generally poor in academic performance. In these groups, academic achievement may be regarded as unimportant by the members. As a result, children who are weaker on academic achievement in the group may not experience much pressure from their peers. Moreover, the common negative attitudes toward academic achievement may lead to group approval and support for deviant behaviors, such as violation of school rules and disruption of classroom instruction, and thus make the children at particular risk for maladaptive social development. Based on these arguments, we expected that group level academic performance might moderate the associations between individual academic performance and social functioning variables. Specifically, the positive relations between individual academic performance and prosocial-cooperative behavior, leadership and peer acceptance would be stronger in high achievement groups than in low achievement groups. Consistently, the negative relations between individual academic achievement and social and relational problems such as aggression and overall peer rejection might be more evident in academically poor groups than in academically competent groups.
In summary, the peer group in children and adolescents has been an important topic in the area of social development. Researchers have been interested in how the group is involved in individual social and cognitive functioning. Although the group has often been conceptualized as a social context for development (e.g., Brown, 1990; Cairns & Cairns, 1994), however, the contextual model has seldom been directly assessed, largely due to methodological difficulties. Group context and individual functioning represent social complexities at different levels (Hinde, 1987). Conventional strategies such as multiple regression and analysis of variance suffer from such problems as aggregation bias and misestimated precision, and more importantly, result in conceptual confusions by treating the social context as an ordinary °variable ±. In the present study, we attempted to examine, in a sample of Chinese children, the role of peer group context in maintaining relations between academic achievement and social functioning. We were interested in (1) relations between academic achievement and social functioning at the group level, and (2) moderating effects of the group on the relations between individual academic achievement and social functioning. A hierarchical linear modeling (HLM, Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992) was applied to analyze the relations between variables at different levels (group vs. individual levels). HLM allowed us to assess hierarchically nested relations through decomposing variances at different levels and estimating the effects of higher-order variables on relations at certain levels, without involving aggregation bias and the °unit of analysis ± problems (see Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992 for further discussion). Finally, as a secondary goal, we were interested in the descriptive properties (e.g., size, composition, homogeneity, age differences) of peer groups in Chinese children and adolescents. We believe that the results would be helpful for us to develop a culture-inclusive database of children ¯s peer groups.
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This article is from:
Xinyin Chen, Lei Chang, and Yunfeng He. (2003). The peer group as a context: Mediating and moderating effects on relations between academic achievement and social functioning in Chinese children. Child Development. 74(3), 710-727.
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